#and put republican economists in charge of everything

[seymour-butz-stuff]

One of social media’s most notorious alt-right trolls in the 2016 election—known then as “Ricky Vaughn,” hiding the identity of a 28-year-old Vermont man named Douglass Mackey—was arrested Monday by the FBI on charges that he and others schemed to interfere in the election by convincing some 4,500 voters to use a fake text-message system, thinking they were submitting their official ballots. Predictably, there were immediate cries of outrage from the white-nationalist far right.

None were quite as predictable, however, as the defense of Mackey that was broadcast nationwide by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show that evening: Beyond mere gaslighting his audience about the threat of white nationalism, as well as who Mackey is and what he did, Carlson unleashed on his audience a deluge of straight-up lies about the case.

The indictment of Mackey is noteworthy, not least because Republicans have claimed—without any evidence—throughout the past four years that Democrats have engaged in massive vote fraud, and yet we are presented with yet another example of very real vote fraud undertaken on behalf of Donald Trump.

It details how Mackey and his cohorts—which included Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, another alt-right troll who was arrested last week for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—coordinated an online scheme in which they targeted Democratic voters with a scam convincing them they could vote online. The voters were told they could vote for Hillary Clinton simply by posting a specific hashtag on Twitter or Facebook, or by sending a text with her name in it to a specific phone code.

Mackey, an unrepentant racist on Twitter, made no bones that his personal agenda was primarily to “limit black turnout,” the complaint says. As HuffPost’s Luke O’Brien details, Vaughn was working with some of the worst of the worst:

The complaint lists four co-conspirators referred to only by Twitter “user IDs,” a unique string of numbers assigned to each Twitter account. HuffPost can report that one co-conspirator is a prominent alt-right botmaster who goes by “Microchip” and was instrumental in making pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton hashtags and content go viral on Twitter during the 2016 election. A fascist accelerationist who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism, Microchip claims to have been involved in the early spread of the QAnon conspiracy cult and repeatedly told this reporter that his goal was to destroy the United States.

“Ricky Vaughn” was not just your average troll, either. As the DOJ explained in its press release on the case, he had a large Twitter following of about 58,000, but his influence was very broad. It notes: “A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking his account above outlets and individuals such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).”

Then in November 2016, Twitter banned “Ricky Vaughn,” along with a number of other white-nationalist accounts, and his influence vanished practically overnight. Then, his identity was revealed during a spat with white-nationalist politician Paul Nehlen, and in short order his past as a Middlebury College grad, his employment in the financial sector in Manhattan, and other personal details all came to light in a HuffPost profile.

“What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process—by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text—amounted to nothing short of vote theft,” remarked William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBI’s New York Field Office in the DOJ press release. “It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story.”

Unsurprisingly, Carlson’s instantaneous defense of Mackey after his arrest Sunday omits all of this information, and tries to portray Mackey as a harmless meme-wielding prankster and the scheme as simply “making fun of Democrats.”

It was a performance not only perfectly aligned with Carlson’s running claims that the threat of the white-nationalist right is a “hoax,” but likely as well a preview of how Republicans and conservatives will be approaching the issue: namely, by gaslighting the public into believing that what happened on January 6 in the U.S. Capitol didn’t really happen.

But Carlson’s defense of Mackey, as well as his general campaign to convince the public that white nationalists pose no threat to American democracy, is also veering into the same kind of self-own that conservatives used—successfully—in 2009 to trample an earlier attempt by the nation’s law-enforcement apparatus to tackle the radical right. That was when the Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin to law-enforcement agencies warning of a resurgence of radical-right organizing and recruitment, and right-wing media (led by Fox News) shrieked hysterically that the bulletin was an “indictment of conservatives” and an “attack on the tea party.”

Carlson has been saying essentially the same thing this week, identifying ordinary conservatives and Fox News watchers with the white nationalists who invaded the Capitol on January 6. On Monday he ran a clip of Congressman Adam Schiff commenting on the need for a swift response by law enforcement to the takeover:

Schiff: We have been urging for some time that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security raise the priority to domestic terrorism to white nationalism as it threatens the country. And we’re going to continue sounding the alarm and make sure they’re devoting the resources, the time, the attention, just as we did after 9/11 to the threat from international terrorism, we need to give the same priority and urgency to domestic terrorism.

Carlson then launched into a tirade that directly identified his audience with those domestic terrorists, claiming that Schiff was talking about ordinary Republicans:

Got that? Vote the wrong way and you are a jihadi. You thought you were an American citizen with rights and just a different view. But no, you’re a jihadi. And we’re going to treat you the way we did those radicals after 9/11. The way we treated Bin Laden. Get in line, pal. This is a war on terror.

… Keep in mind, they’re talking about American citizens here. They’re talking about you. But nobody seems to notice or care.

On the same broadcast, Carlson offered a similar defense of the QAnon cult, portraying their counterfactual and reality-bereft conspiracy theories as mere political beliefs, and attempts to expose and counter their smears, falsehoods, and violent agenda as part of a liberal scheme to enforce a kind of thought control.

“Once politicians attempt to control what you believe, they are no longer politicians. They are by definition dictators,” he intoned, and then went on to charge that “they have all, almost every one of them, joined the mob of censors, hysterics, and Jacobin destroyers, all working on behalf of entrenched power, to take total control of everything.”

Carlson’s rhetorical gambit on Monday was essentially a kind of hard-nosed gaslighting, insisting that what ordinary people see emanating from the radical right can all just be explained away if you frame it in benign enough terms. But on Tuesday, he didn’t simply whitewash the reality, he resorted to outright baldfaced lies in rising to defend Douglass Mackey.

His opening line, in fact, was utterly false: “Mackey is a 31-year-old conservative journalist from Florida,” Carlson said. In fact, Mackey is not any kind of journalist at all; he has never published any piece of journalism at any publication, having in fact been an economist at John Dunham & Associates until 2016. Carlson clearly wanted to make this all about the First Amendment, even if the facts inconveniently did not fit.

He went on:

At 7 a.m. FBI agents showed up at Mackey’s house. They threw him in handcuffs and they dragged him to a cell. He now faces ten years in prison. His crime? He made fun of powerful Democrats on social media.

As the federal criminal complaint puts it, ‘Mackey made coordinated use of social media to spread disinformation relevant to the impending 2016 presidential election. The disinformation spread by these individuals, the Biden administration solemnly proclaimed, often took the form of memes.’

Yes, memes. Online mockery. Mockery online is now illegal if it’s aimed at the wrong people. Doug Mackey hurt their feelings, so they put him in jail.

According to Joe Biden’s Justice Department, Doug Mackey violated 18 U.S. Code Section 241. He did this by tricking people, like the dastardly trickster that he is, into not voting in the presidential election. What’s interesting is that prosecutors showed no evidence whatsoever that Doug Mackey actually tricked anyone into anything, voting or not. Not a single person.

This is just risibly, utterly false. Right in the DOJ’s press release/statement on the case, prosecutors explain that a substantial number of people were gulled by Mackey’s scam: “On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant and his co-conspirators.”

And of course, it would not be a complete Tucker Carlson episode without completely whitewashing who and what “Ricky Vaughn” was, as online entities go: “By the way, we have no ideas what Mackey’s views are,” he sniffed. “We don’t care. What CNN is telling us is those views are a crime.”

In fact, the crime with which Mackey is charged only incidentally involves his views, and of course revolves entirely around his efforts depriving Black citizens of their vote by deception, which is a federal felony. But it also is important for the public to understand what depraved beliefs motivated Mackey to commit these crimes along with other white nationalists—particularly the vicious anti-Semitism and relentless racial and ethnic bigotry.

Media Matters’ Nikki McCann Ramirez provides a number of examples of the ugliness of Mackey’s memes—the same memes that Carlson laughs off as harmless pranks, and dismisses as insignificant. These memes ran the gamut of bigotry: misogynist, homophobic, nativist, racist, and deeply anti-Semitic.

As Sarah Posner and I noted in our Mother Jones report on Trump’s interactions with the alt-right and other extremists, he was among the top influencers spreading the white-nationalist “white genocide” hashtag. Meanwhile, three members of Trump’s inner circle followed “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, and his son Donald Trump Jr. sometimes retweeted him.

But Carlson saved his most hysterical rhetoric for the end of his rant:

What, you may be wondering, does a case like this mean for the First Amendment? Well, it means that it’s effectively suspended. You can now be arrested for saying the wrong things. And at 7 a.m. this morning, one journalist actually was arrested for that. Almost no one tonight seems to be defending him. ‘He had bad thoughts! He deserves it!’ They think it’s OK. And that shouldn’t surprise you. Because we’re clearly living under some form of martial law at the moment.

This new version of democracy is a democracy where everyone fervently agrees with the people in power or else they go immediately to jail. Doug Mackey’s problem, it turns out, is that he doesn’t properly understand what democracy is.

… You may have thought you were a decent American in good standing. Ten years ago, nobody in this country would have called your views extreme. They weren’t extreme then. You don’t think they’re extreme now, you’ve always considered yourself a pretty moderate person—live your life and get along with others. Oh ho, that’s not possible now—because the rules have changed. You are now a dangerous insurgent. You are no different from a bloodthirsty Pashtun in Helmand Province, or an ISIS terrorist in Erbil! You’re part of a guerrilla insurgency.

So there you have the essence of the gathering Republican response to any kind of effort to confront the right-wing extremism that fueled the January 6 insurrection: When you crack down on white supremacists and far-right domestic terrorists, you crack down on ordinary Republicans.

Carlson has not been alone. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul attacked Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, in which he called for confronting domestic terrorism, as “thinly veiled innuendo” targeting Republicans. “Calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book,” he said on Fox News.

It’s a strategic response, in fact, that—despite its seemingly obvious self-indictment, not to mention its complete estrangement from the actual wording of the accusations—worked well in 2009, when Fox News-fueled hysteria forced DHS to ultimately withdraw and apologize for that domestic-terrorism memo that turned out to be so prescient today. And there’s little question that the law-enforcement failures that subsequently ensued over the next decade were directly related to that counterfactual hysteria.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was a congressman at the time, told USA Today that the letter foreshadowed the events unfolding before us.

"When we decided as a society that we were going to just simply not address violent right-wing extremists, we simply allowed that movement to grow. We allowed that movement to flourish,” he said.

If you get upset when someone threatens a white supremacist, you might be a white supremacist.

#2 #tucker carlson #white supremacy #white supremacists

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Political scientists also increasingly interpret human political structures as data-processing systems. Like capitalism and communism, so democracies and dictatorships are in essence competing mechanisms for gathering and analysing information. Dictatorships use centralised processing methods, whereas democracies prefer distributed processing. In the last decades democracy gained the upper hand because under the unique conditions of the late twentieth century, distributed processing worked better. Under alternative conditions – those prevailing in the ancient Roman Empire, for instance – centralised processing had an edge, which is why the Roman Republic fell and power shifted from the Senate and popular assemblies into the hands of a single autocratic emperor.

This implies that as data-processing conditions change again in the twenty-first century, democracy might decline and even disappear. As both the volume and speed of data increase, venerable institutions like elections, parties and parliaments might become obsolete – not because they are unethical, but because they don’t process data efficiently enough. These institutions evolved in an era when politics moved faster than technology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Industrial Revolution unfolded slowly enough for politicians and voters to remain one step ahead of it and regulate and manipulate its course. Yet whereas the rhythm of politics has not changed much since the days of steam, technology has switched from first gear to fourth. Technological revolutions now outpace political processes, causing MPs and voters alike to lose control.

The rise of the Internet gives us a taste of things to come. Cyberspace is now crucial to our daily lives, our economy and our security. Yet the critical choices between alternative web designs weren’t taken through a democratic political process, even though they involved traditional political issues such as sovereignty, borders, privacy and security. Did you ever vote about the shape of cyberspace? Decisions made by web designers far from the public limelight mean that today the Internet is a free and lawless zone that erodes state sovereignty, ignores borders, abolishes privacy and poses perhaps the most formidable global security risk. Whereas a decade ago it hardly registered on the radar, today hysterical officials are predicting an imminent cyber 9/11.

Governments and NGOs consequently conduct intense debates about restructuring the Internet, but it is much harder to change an existing system than to intervene at its inception. Besides, by the time the cumbersome government bureaucracy makes up its mind about cyber regulation, the Internet has morphed ten times. The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare. It is overwhelmed by data. The NSA may be spying on your every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. Never in history did a government know so much about what’s going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It’s like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.

In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar. Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future.

That doesn’t mean we will go back to twentieth-century-style dictatorships. Authoritarian regimes seem to be equally overwhelmed by the pace of technological development and the speed and volume of the data flow. In the twentieth century, dictators had grand visions for the future. Communists and fascists alike sought to completely destroy the old world and build a new world in its place. Whatever you think about Lenin, Hitler or Mao, you cannot accuse them of lacking vision. Today it seems that leaders have a chance to pursue even grander visions. While communists and Nazis tried to create a new society and a new human with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and super-computers.

In science-fiction films, ruthless Hitler-like politicians are quick to pounce on such new technologies, putting them in the service of this or that megalomaniac political ideal. Yet flesh-and-blood politicians in the early twenty-first century, even in authoritarian countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea, are nothing like their Hollywood counterparts. They don’t seem to plot any Brave New World. The wildest dreams of Kim Jong-un and Ali Khamenei don’t go much beyond atom bombs and ballistic missiles: that is so 1945. Putin’s aspirations seem confined to rebuilding the old Soviet zone, or the even older tsarist empire. Meanwhile in the USA, paranoid Republicans accuse Barack Obama of being a ruthless despot hatching conspiracies to destroy the foundations of American society – yet in eight years of presidency he barely managed to pass a minor health-care reform. Creating new worlds and new humans is far beyond his agenda.

Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. In the early twenty-first century, politics is consequently bereft of grand visions. Government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it. It makes sure teachers are paid on time and sewage systems don’t overflow, but it has no idea where the country will be in twenty years.

To some extent, this is a very good thing. Given that some of the big political visions of the twentieth century led us to Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Great Leap Forward, maybe we are better off in the hands of petty-minded bureaucrats. Mixing godlike technology with megalomaniac politics is a recipe for disaster. Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market. They thereby give politicians the perfect excuse for inaction and ignorance, which are reinterpreted as profound wisdom. Politicians find it convenient to believe that the reason they don’t understand the world is that they need not understand it.

Yet mixing godlike technology with myopic politics also has its downside. Lack of vision isn’t always a blessing, and not all visions are necessarily bad. In the twentieth century, the dystopian Nazi vision did not fall apart spontaneously. It was defeated by the equally grand visions of socialism and liberalism. It is dangerous to trust our future to market forces, because these forces do what’s good for the market rather than what’s good for humankind or for the world. The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence.

Some people believe that there is somebody in charge after all. Not democratic politicians or autocratic despots, but rather a small coterie of billionaires who secretly run the world. But such conspiracy theories never work, because they underestimate the complexity of the system. A few billionaires smoking cigars and drinking Scotch in some back room cannot possibly understand everything happening on the globe, let alone control it. Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today’s chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else, but because they have very narrow aims. In a chaotic system, tunnel vision has its advantages, and the billionaires’ power is strictly proportional to their goals. If the world’s richest man would like to make another billion dollars he could easily game the system in order to achieve his goal. In contrast, if he would like to reduce global inequality or stop global warming, even he won’t be able to do it, because the system is far too complex.

Yet power vacuums seldom last long. If in the twenty-first century traditional political structures can no longer process the data fast enough to produce meaningful visions, then new and more efficient structures will evolve to take their place. These new structures may be very different from any previous political institutions, whether democratic or authoritarian. The only question is who will build and control these structures. If humankind is no longer up to the task, perhaps it might give somebody else a try.

- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

#yuval noah harari #homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow #homo deus

[ecoamerica]

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

#ACLA24 #ACLA24Leaders #youtube #youtube video #climate leaders #climate solutions #climate action #climate and environment #climate #climate change #climate and health #climate blog #climate justice #climate news #weather and climate #environmental news #environment #environmental awareness #environment and health #environmental #environmental issues #environmental justice #environment protection #environmental health #Youtube

[tradingjackbs]

In case y'all are still wondering about how bad the pandemic still is, we had a pulmonologist with a panic attack after work saying their clinic was well past capacity and more just keep coming in and we're not even a hotspot for the corona.

#medblr #pandemic #corona #covid-19 #medicine #pulmonology #anxiety #panic attack #this shit is so serious now cause we failed so badly at containing this shit #like y'all remember the ebola scare?? why tf couldn't we handle this like that #oh yeah #trump fired the pandemic response team i fucking forgot #and put republican economists in charge of everything #when they had no business being there #how exciting it got to this point.

[worldofwardcraft]

This is who they follow?

May 20, 2021

The online news service The Hill reports that Darnold Trump is planning on reviving his whine-a-thon rallies in June. And why not? A new Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 82% of Republican voters still hold a favorable view of Trump. And 77% of adult Republicans told The Economist/YouGov survey the same thing. It's hard to see why.

Put aside for the moment his terrible policy decisions as president — the tax cut for fat corporations and billionaires, the damaging trade war with China, the kidnapping and imprisoning of children at the southern border, or his refusal to address the COVID epidemic while thousands of Americans died. Disregard too his appalling appointments — Bill Barr as Attorney General, Louis DeJoy to run the Postal Service (into the ground), Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Jared Kushner to be in charge of everything.

You can even close your eyes temporarily to his blatant racism, misogyny, criminality, corruption, nepotism, mendacity and incompetence. The question would still remain: why do Republicans continue to support Trump when it's so obvious that, on top of everything else, he's so astonishingly stupid?

This is a man who as president always offered a simpleminded, pig-ignorant solution for every problem. California wildfires? Rake the forests. Devastating hurricanes? Nuke 'em. School shootings? Arm the teachers. The Notre Dame fire in Paris? Waterbomb the cathedral. COVID-19? Take hydroxychloroquine, drink some disinfectant or shine a UV light up your butt.

This is the guy who looked directly at the sun during an eclipse, suggested the US should buy Greenland, blamed windmills for cancer, doctored a weather map with a Sharpie, proposed stocking a moat at the border wall with alligators, thought F-35 stealth fighters were actually invisible, and called for boycotts of such companies as Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Citigroup, ViacomCBS and others.

He's also the president who made fun of a handicapped reporter, ridiculed a deceased Vietnam War veteran, pardoned war criminals, ignored Russian bounties on American soldiers and ordered the gassing of peaceful protesters.

And lest we forget, he was responsible for the GOP losing control of the House, the Senate and the presidency, was impeached twice, regularly attacks other party leaders and, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker, told 30,573 lies over his four years in office. Plus, he incited a violent mob to storm the US Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn a free, fair and democratic election. Yet this is the same clueless idiot Republicans insist on clinging to and prefer to be their party's standard-bearer in 2024. Go figure.

#trump cult #trump ignorance #maga idiots

[orbemnews]

The Fed Is Betting Inflation Expectations Will Stay Controlled. It’s a Gamble. Turn on the news, scroll through Facebook, or listen to a White House briefing these days and there’s a good chance you’ll catch the Federal Reserve’s least-favorite word: Inflation. If that bubbling popular concern about prices gets too ingrained in America’s psyche, it could spell trouble for the nation’s central bank. Interest in inflation has jumped this year for both political and practical reasons. Republicans, and even some Democrats, have been warning that the government’s hefty pandemic spending could push inflation higher. And as the economy gains steam, demand is coming back faster than supply. It’s a recipe for bigger price tags for everything from airline tickets to used cars, at least temporarily. The Fed, which Congress has put in charge of controlling inflation, thinks the jump in prices this year will fade as data quirks, supply bottlenecks and a reopening-induced pop in demand work their way through the system. For now, officials see no reason to tap the brakes by slowing down large-scale bond purchases or raising interest rates, policy changes that would slacken demand as an antidote to accelerating inflation. And the Fed has big reasons to avoid overreacting: The problem in the wake of the 2007 to 2009 recession was tepid price gains that risked an economically damaging downward spiral, not fast ones. Inflation far above the central bank’s comfort level hasn’t been a feature of the economic landscape since the 1980s. But prices have stayed in control for so long partly because of muted inflation expectations — a critical factor in the Fed’s current approach. After the central bank’s campaign to choke off rapid inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, consumers and businesses learned to expect slow, steady gains year after year. Shoppers who don’t anticipate price increases may be reluctant to accept them, curbing a business’s power to raise them. But if consumers begin to anticipate faster gains, companies could regain their ability to charge more, locking in today’s temporary price bumps and calling into question the Fed’s plan to support the economy for months and even years to come. Already, there are early signs that expectations could move higher as the economic backdrop changes dramatically. A spate of survey- and market-based gauges of inflation outlooks are already quickly climbing. Were they to shoot up more than the Fed finds acceptable, it could force the Fed to react by dialing back support sooner rather than later. And if officials lift rates early and substantially to control inflation expectations, the risk is a swift return to economic slump. “One of the main tools the Fed has to control inflation and inflation expectations is — it has the ability to cause a recession,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard and former top Obama administration economic official. “That’s not entirely comforting.” The possibility that inflation expectations could jump too high is a different challenge than the one the Fed had been facing. It has spent recent years worrying that prices were too tepid and inflation expectations drifting uncomfortably low. Partly to keep them stable, central bankers changed their whole policy-setting approach last August. They now aim for 2 percent annual price gains on average over time, welcoming periods of faster gains. Some Fed officials — like Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago — have said they’re happy to see inflation expectations rising, taking it as a sign that the plan is working. Others have played down the risk that inflation expectations will jump too high before the economy fully heals. “It seems unlikely, frankly, that we would see inflation moving up in a persistent way that would actually move inflation expectations up, while there was still significant slack in the labor market,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during an April 28 news conference. But price gains have suddenly become a hot topic, and one weighing on the public’s mind. Inflation chatter abounds on cable news, and especially conservative outlets. Fox Business is airing segments that discuss inflation this month at five times its normal rate, according to data from the Gdelt Project. On Fox News Channel, mentions of inflation have surged to six times the normal rate. Google searches for “inflation” have taken off, Twitter inflation hashtags have increased, and monthly price data reports have newly become front-page headlines. The surge in attention comes amid stories of computer chip shortages, gas lines, and surging lumber prices, and also as overall measures of real-world price gains are speeding up. Today in Business Updated  May 17, 2021, 12:48 p.m. ET Consumer Price Inflation surprised economists by rocketing higher in April, data released last week showed, rising by 4.2 percent. While prices were expected to climb for technical reasons, supply bottlenecks and resurgent demand combined to push the data point much higher than the 3.6 percent analysts had penciled in. Fed officials use a different but related index to define their inflation goal. Eye-popping gains are widely expected to cool down as supply catches up with demand and reopening quirks clear, but as they catch consumer attention, inflation expectations are shooting higher across a range of measures. And that poses a risk. “Price spikes caused by temporary pandemic oddities could have a more lasting impact if they raise inflation expectations substantially,” analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote in a May 16 research note. Market-based expectation measures are surging, with one that gauges where inflation will be in five years touching its highest level since 2006 last week. A consumer survey collected by the University of Michigan — and closely watched by top Fed officials — jumped in preliminary May data, rising to 4.6 percent for the next year and 3.1 percent for the next five, the highest level in a decade. The gap between short- and long-term expectations is echoed in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations. Americans’ year-ahead inflation expectations rose to the highest level since 2013 in April, but the outlook for inflation over the next three years has been much more stable. Fed policymakers have taken heart in the fact that households seem to be preparing more for a short-term pop — something central bankers have said they are willing to look past without lifting rates — than for years of superfast price gains. But they have been clear that there are limits to tolerable increases, without precisely defining what those would be. If expectations started to rise “month after month after month,” that would be concerning, Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said during an interview on May 10, before the latest Michigan data were released. She declined to put a number on what would worry her. Inflation expectations data are notoriously hard to parse, and the consumer trackers tend to be heavily influenced by gas prices. The Fed has recently been using a quarterly measure that has moved up by less. But the speed of recent adjustments has called into question how much acceleration would be a problem, signaling that people have come to accept inflation in a way that will keep actual prices rising. The inflation outlook is uncertain both because of the unusual moment — the economy has never reopened from a pandemic before — and because the way the government approaches economic policy has shifted over the past year. The Fed’s new policy approach, adopted last August, both aims for periods of higher inflation and doubles down on the central bank’s full employment goal. Practically, it means the central bank plans to leave rates low for years, and it has helped to justify continuing a huge bond-buying program that the Fed began at the start of the pandemic downturn. Those policies make money cheap to borrow, ultimately bolstering demand for goods and services and helping prices to rise. At the same time, the federal government has drastically loosened its purse strings, spending trillions of dollars to pull the economy out of the pandemic recession. Both the fiscal and the monetary response are meant to keep households economically whole through a challenging period, so there was also a risk to having less-ambitious policies. Things will most likely work out, economists have predicted. The demand boom anticipated in 2021 is unlikely to last, because consumers’ pandemic savings will eventually be exhausted. Supply issues should be resolved, though it is not clear when. Many analysts expect prices to moderate over the next year or so. But some underline that expectations are the vulnerability to watch when it comes to inflation, in case they shift before the smoke clears and prices slow their ascent. “This is something people are talking about in their daily lives, it’s not just a Washington thing,” said Michael Strain, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. “My expectation is that expectations will remain anchored — but it’s clearly a huge risk.” Jim Tankersley contributed reporting. Source link Orbem News #Betting #controlled #expectations #Fed #Gamble #Inflation #Stay

[toshootforthestars]

When some economists advised sending every American a check, Pelosi shot that down, arguing against money for millionaires. This culminated in a means-tested $1,200 stimulus payment. You only got the money if your earnings were under $100,000 per year, based on earnings data as far back as 2018. This deprived people who subsequently may have lost their job from getting relief.

A separate legislative response purported to provide sick leave to workers, except employers with more than 500 workers and those with fewer than 50 were exempted from the requirement. When asked about this, Pelosi said large employers should provide sick leave themselves, without government subsidies (workers needing paid time off might not have minded). Meanwhile, several legislative efforts promised free COVID-19 testing for all, but the health care industry has managed to find loopholes there too: Reporters keep finding people paying thousands of dollars.

Meanwhile, while Pelosi took the lead on the initial, smaller bills, she allowed Mitch McConnell to write the vehicle for economic relief, known as the CARES Act. McConnell casually drew up a $4.5 trillion “money cannon” corporate bailout, which rapidly rescued the investor class before it was even spent. Who drafts the baseline legislation makes a big difference: If Pelosi had written the CARES Act, it could have included such ideas from her caucus as government-provided payroll support, increased food stamps, guaranteed vote-by-mail to ensure voting rights during the pandemic, significant state and local aid, free coronavirus treatment, assistance for the U.S. Postal Service (which may go belly-up come September), a national contact tracing program, and much more. Instead, they just got to tweak McConnell’s work, without altering its tilt toward the powerful.

Relief for individuals, like the one-time stimulus checks and boosts to unemployment insurance, was clumsily implemented and, most important, temporary. Pelosi and Schumer touted stringent corporate-bailout oversight, but Trump fired the inspectors general charged with monitoring it, and Pelosi and McConnell spent months failing to name a chair of the only entity Trump couldn’t meddle with, the Congressional Oversight Commission.

These failures were Pelosi’s alone. She deliberately slowed allowing members to vote remotely or through a proxy while lawmakers were locked down at home. Because of this, during the crucial months of March and April, Pelosi became a one-woman House of Representatives, unilaterally writing legislation or negotiating with Republicans, and presenting the finished product to House members, take it or leave it. This effectively disenfranchised hundreds of millions of Americans and limited the Democratic Caucus to issuing press releases while Pelosi did the work of governing. But this power grab wasn’t put toward anything resembling a clear goal.

After four bills passed, Pelosi got around to putting together a bill, the HEROES Act, which included all of the important pieces she deferred in other legislation. But by this time, Republicans had their corporate bailout and could ignore further efforts. The HEROES Act was another unfocused wish list, which Democratic leaders telegraphed as a messaging bill to set up future negotiations. As of press time, those negotiations hadn’t begun.

The bill also included random giveaways. It extended small-business grants to K Street lobbyists, even though lobby firms were still as busy as ever trying to win perks for their clients. This would amount to Congress donating to the groups that devise campaigns intended to influence them, and as former members often gravitate to K Street, would have lawmakers handing over money to their future employers, which is about as corrupt as you can get.

UNDERLYING THIS ALL, incredibly in the midst of a crisis, was a Pelosi tendency that had grown over the years: obsessive concern with deficits. Pelosi rolled back student debt relief in the HEROES Act after learning that it would cost $100 billion more than expected. This was a $3.2 trillion messaging bill not designed to become law, yet an additional 3 percent cost was considered unacceptable. Pelosi also declined to add “automatic stabilizers” that would maintain expanded benefits until economic stress dissipated, blaming a Congressional Budget Office scoring quirk that made the cost appear artificially larger.

So with over 30 million out of work, the important thing to Pelosi was that her pie-in-the-sky, going-nowhere bill was "reasonable,” based on some ineffable standard of reason. It matches the worldview of a Democratic leader who, just two years ago, made a lugubrious elegy on the House floor after the death of Pete Peterson, who bankrolled the deficit hysteria industry for decades and relentlessly targeted Social Security for cuts. ([Author] Ball does reveal that Pelosi told Obama during his “grand bargain” talks that she would support his aims, “even if it meant agreeing to entitlement cuts.”)

Devotion to deficit hawkery in normal times is unwise policy. It’s downright fatal during an economic crisis, where relief could be yanked away from needy families prematurely simply because of an unwillingness to challenge the CBO’s scoring model. But here we finally see the contours of Pelosi’s governing framework, not just on the budget, but on everything.

Pelosi believes that the nation’s resources are scarce, and what sadly passes for the modern welfare state must be protected at all costs, rather than raised to greater heights. The goal is, at best, a less bad world than Republicans want. It’s a defensive crouch dating back to Pelosi’s initial entry into Congress under President Reagan, and it has dominated her thinking ever since.

Progressives who dream too big are to be sat in a corner, and anti-government conservatives are to be bargained with and mollified. Official Washington’s approval is craved. Pelosi hosts an annual ideas conference at her own vineyard for a group of elite donors. That’s who gets to scale the fortress she has built around her desiccated ambitions. Her thoughts today on activism date back to something she said during her first campaign: “Someday they will realize just how insignificant they are.”

Pelosi demands total control; you can argue that she never groomed a successor for this purpose, to keep everyone reliant on her. She finds this to be the best method to gain leverage over the legislative process. But to what end is this leverage employed? Pelosi fights intensely to obtain power, but she seems toconsider power so fragile and fleeting that it shouldn’t be used for very much.

Democrats captured the House in the 2018 midterms on a promise to counter Trump’s lawlessness and corruption. Yet today we have an unchecked kleptocracy, with very little sustained oversight coming from the House. Trump’s wars were not discontinued and his border camps were not shut down; even his border wall, which caused a prolonged government shutdown in 2019, was still funded through repurposing military money, something the House has never attempted to reverse.

Now, we have a crisis recovery limited to the wealthy and connected, threatening economic disaster for ordinary people. Leverage for a better solution was squandered. John Boehner was an incompetent leader, but even in divided government, he succeeded in his caucus’s primary aim of cutting spending. During his tenure, public investment fell to its lowest portion of GDP since Eisenhower. Pelosi is clever and sharp, yet astonishingly little has changed.

Pelosi’s deal to gain the Speaker’s gavel a second time requires her to step down after 2022. If Joe Biden wins the election, and Democrats gain a governing trifecta, she’ll have one final chance to write her legacy. The circumstances dictate a far different course than she appears capable of steering. The past 40 years have seen endless stagnant wages, sinking economic mobility, collapsing trade unionism, and soaring income and wealth inequality, to say nothing of even more enduring structural racism and the persistent black-white wealth gap.

David Dayen:  A Leader Without Leading

The American Prospect  |   July 2020

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Amazon is the poster child for everything wrong with post-Reagan anti-trust enforcement

Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal unpicking a half-century's shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had gone very, very wrong -- and, unexpectedly, this law student's longread on one of the most technical and abstract areas of law has become the centerpiece of a raging debate in law and economics circles.

The article is called Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, and you should read it, because Khan is a sprightly and gifted writer with a talent for squeezing some exciting and relevant juice out of dry and abstract subjects.

At its heart is a critique of the neoliberal "Chicago School" and its new orthodoxy about when monopolies are a problem -- an orthodoxy that is at odds with much of the world and hundreds of years' worth of US lawmaking and enforcement.

The Chicago School is notorious for its emphasis on profits ahead of all else, its complicity in tens of thousands of death-squad executions in Chile, its influence on Thatcher, Reagan and their contemporaries in their belief that "there is no such thing as society" and "greed is good" -- the belief that behaving as selfishly as possible will make everyone richer and happier.

It's this school and its adherents that John Kenneth Galbraith was speaking of when he called economics "the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." As you might imagine, if you owe your fortune to selfishness, ruthlessness and greed, you might want to fund and elevate this kind of exercise. Nothing confers empirical respectability to manifestly immoral behavior like a lot of inscrutable mathematics that purportedly shows the self-perfecting nature of a system of greedy, "rational" actors.

The Chicago School holds that monopolies are only bad when they result in higher prices ("price theory") and that everything else -- the "structuralist" worry about rich people amassing political power, or making inferior goods, or screwing their workforce, or holding back innovation -- is just a distraction.

This model rose to prominence in the 1980s with Reaganomics, and it coincided with catastrophic collapse in small business in America(especially minority-owned businesses); since Reagan, Republicans and Democrats alike have been enthusiastic proponents of the idea that the only thing a competition watchdog should keep an eye on is the prices charged to consumers, not "integration," be it vertical (one firm owning the factory, the trucks and the stores) or horizontal (companies buying out their direct competitors).

Using Amazon as her poster-child, Khan argues that whatever problems this approach had in bricks-and-mortarland (she highlights several), the combination of networks, digital goods, data-oriented retail, and huge pools of investment capital willing to float businesses like Amazon using their profits from one area to sell goods below cost in others to the detriment of their competitors, make mincemeat out of price-theory. The digital world -- where each customer might pay a different price, where retailers can use algorithms to price their competition out of existence -- is one where costs of one category of goods can't possibly capture the wider harms of monopolistic practice.

Related to this is On the Formation of Capital and Wealth, by Stanford's Mordecai Kurz, who proposes a means by which digital commerce can drive a winner-take-all phenomenon that makes the rich much richer, at the expense of the general welfare.

The question, then, is what to do about it. Khan suggests some modest reforms in anti-trust enforcement, which, despite their modesty and the extremely unlikeliness of seeing them enacted under Trump or any future establishment Democratic administration, have provoked howls of outrage from Chicago School economists.

More radical approaches have been proposed, of course. Paul Mason's Postcapitalism points to Amazon's very monopolism as the reason to believe that capitalism has outserved its usefulness. If a monopolist like Amazon can use customer surveillance and algorithms to decide what to make, where to put it, and how to deliver it, why do we need imperfect markets? Just nationalize Amazon and its datasets (for the record, I think Mason was unduly optimistic about the problems of anonymizing large data-sets).

But if the internet supercharges inequality and monopolism while delivering many undeniable benefits in coordination, culture, and material production, can we simply divorce technology from the economic and social context that created it? Can we have the internet without douchey Silicon Valley jerktech and its lucrepaths, vulgarati, uberization, mom-as-a-service, and *-bait?

It's not without precedent: the Protestant reformation gave us religion without the unified Church; the Enlightenment gave us alchemy without superstition; and Wikipedia and GNU/Linux gave us encyclopedias and operating systems without a single corporate overlord. As Leigh Phillips wrote in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts, the belief that Chicago-style sociopathic capitalism is the sole proprietor of technological change and improvement is one of the Chicago School's most successful projects, one that convinced large swaths of the left that you either have to be pro-technology or pro-human, that being anti-corporatism meant that you had to oppose the technical feats of corporations.

Science fiction's best move is cleaving a technology from its social and economic context, as steampunk does, when it imagines industrial-style production without the great Satanic mills where people become part of the machines, moving through scripted and constrained tasks in unison to the ticking of a huge time-clock. In steampunk, individual inventors and small groups produce things with the polish and awe-inspiring innovations of the industrial revolution, without the surrender of individual autonomy that industrialization demands of its workers. In steampunk -- to quote Magpie Killjoy -- we "love the machine and hate the factory."

The problem with Amazon isn't that it's now really easy to get a wide variety of goods without having to shlep all over the place trying to find the right widget (or book). The problem is the effect that this has on workers, publishers, writers, drivers, warehouse workers, and competition.

https://boingboing.net/2017/08/07/economists-so-fragile.html

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Carbon Dividends: A Plan for Earth’s Survival that Can Survive U.S. Politics?

Digital Elixir Carbon Dividends: A Plan for Earth’s Survival that Can Survive U.S. Politics?

Yves here. Carbon dividends are a way to create support for setting a price for carbon. None other than those starry-eyed granola heads at Financial Times called for setting a price for carbon in 2007.

Pigovian taxes (ones meant to discourage activity, like transactions taxes) should typically not be seen as revenue generators, since you want the thing they tax to go away or at least diminish a ton. But advanced economies are so hooked on fossil fuels that these disincentives will take time to change behavior in a fundamental way.

By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Every day it becomes clearer that we have to break our addiction to extracting dirty stuff from the ground to burn for energy. But how to pull it off without triggering political and economic chaos? Economist James K. Boyce, a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of a new book exploring that question, The Case for Carbon Dividends. In a conversation with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, he outlines a plan that could not only reduce carbon emissions, but help bridge the gap between the rich and the rest. And it might even survive the political system.

Lynn Parramore: You take it as a given that the key to reducing fossil fuel use is to put a price on carbon emissions. But some say that it won’t really impact climate change or that it will hurt the economy in various ways. How do you respond?

James K. Boyce: A price on carbon emissions is one key piece of the solution. But it can’t be just any price: it has to be anchored to an emissions-reduction trajectory that is consistent with climate objectives, such as the Paris target of limiting the increase in average global temperatures to 1.5-2 °C.

There are a several options for doing that. One is putting a cap on the total amount of fossil fuels allowed to enter the economy, a cap that would get lower over time. Then, we could auction allowances (also called permits) up to the limit set by the cap. Another option is a tax that is indexed to emission targets, so that the rate adjusts automatically as needed, sort of like an adjustable-rate mortgage. Or we could have a combination of the two, in which the tax is the floor price for permit auctions.

Arbitrarily setting a price and hoping it will do the job is a recipe for uncertainty at best and failure at worst. It’s true that most carbon prices across the world today are too low to have had a substantial impact on emissions. But that’s an argument for a more robust price, not for a price of zero. Just because you’ve tasted weak coffee doesn’t mean you should never drink coffee again.

Would a carbon price that is robust enough to do the job “hurt the economy”? Quite the contrary. What will really hurt the economy is failure to stabilize the Earth’s climate. A carbon price firmly anchored to emissions-reduction goals will reorient the economy towards greater energy efficiency and cleaner energy. The resulting innovation and investment will grow the economy, but grow it in a new direction, leaving behind the fossil-fueled era.

LP: What exactly are carbon dividends?

JB: Carbon dividends are equal payments to every resident funded with the revenue from putting a price on carbon.

LP: So that means once these revenues start rolling in, everybody gets checks in the mail?

JB: That’s the idea. Dividends can be disbursed monthly, quarterly, or annually. It’s not rocket science to do this. Alaska already pays dividends to all state residents with revenue from oil extraction. One could even front-load the payments, so that the first dividend arrives as soon as fuel prices go up.

The economic principle behind carbon dividends is called a “feebate”: individuals pay fees according to their use of a shared resource, and receive rebates by virtue of their common ownership of the resource. The idea can be illustrated by an analogy.

Suppose that 1,000 people work in an office building whose parking lot has only a few hundred spaces. If everyone could park free of charge, there would be chronic excess demand. To avert the resulting congestion, a fee is charged to limit demand for parking spaces to the lot’s capacity. Every month the money that is collected in parking fees is paid out as equal rebates to everyone who works in the building. Those who bicycle to work or take public transport come out ahead: they pay nothing to park and still get their share of the revenue. Those who carpool more or less break even. Those who commute every day in a single-occupancy vehicle pay more in fees than they get back.

Carbon dividends apply this idea to parking emissions in the atmosphere.

LP: How does your proposal fit into the idea of a Green New Deal?

JB: The centerpiece of the Green New Deal is investment and innovation in a clean energy economy that works for everyone, not just for the richest one percent. Carbon dividends fit perfectly with this idea.

Placing a strict limit on how much fossil fuel we burn – which increases their price – strengthens the incentives for individuals, firms, and governments to invest in the clean energy economy of the future. And dividends are paid to everyone, so the revenue from higher fuel prices, the carbon price, is not pocketed by the wealthy and powerful few. Carbon dividends are based on the principle that we all own the atmospheric parking lot in common and equal measure.

The net impact of the price-and-dividend policy on any household’s income depends on the size of its carbon footprint. Most low-income households come out ahead, since they consume less-than-average amounts of just about everything, including fossil fuels. Most middle-class households break even or come out a bit ahead. Upper-income households generally pay more in higher fuel prices than they get back in dividends, because of their higher consumption of just about everything, including fossil fuels.

LP: So that keeps carbon taxes or prices from hurting people who can least afford it, like truck drivers or ordinary commuters.

JB: Right. In industrialized countries like the U.S., fuels are more of a necessity than a luxury. As a percentage of their incomes – although not in terms of absolute dollars – the poor spend more on fossil fuel than the middle class, and the middle class spends more than the rich. In the absence of dividends, in other words, carbon prices are tantamount to a regressive tax.

One possible alternative use for carbon revenue is to fund public investment, including investments in a Green New Deal. It would be possible to use some revenue for this purpose and some for dividends. Back in 2009, for example, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced a bill that would have capped emissions, auctioned permits, returned 75% of the revenue to the people as dividends, and devoted the remaining 25% to public investment. But it would be an irony – and a serious political liability – if the Green New Deal were funded mainly by a regressive tax.

LP: How would the carbon dividends plan be implemented?

JB: It’s pretty straightforward. We know how to auction carbon permits. The northeastern states, for example, have been doing it four times a year for the past decade in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for curbing power plant emissions. We know how to pay dividends. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been doing it for more than 30 years.

The easiest way to disburse dividends is via electronic payments. Just like Social Security and veterans’ benefits. Those who prefer them can get checks in the mail. A compelling advantage of disbursing dividends as stand-alone payments, rather than in the form of income tax credits or by some other indirect route, is to ensure that they are completely visible to the public. This visibility is crucial for the political durability of carbon pricing. People will see fuel prices rising at the pump. At the same time, they need to see the revenue coming back to them in a fair and transparent manner.

To protect energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, most carbon pricing proposals include border adjustments like carbon tariffs on imports and rebates to exporters. That way, companies can maintain their competitiveness vis-à-vis producers in locations without a comparable carbon price.

The price-and-dividend plan could be implemented by individual states, too. One way to tackle the competitiveness issue at the state level is to set aside a share of the total carbon revenue equal to what is paid by businesses, and to rebate this to firms in equal amounts per employee. A side-benefit of this would be to strengthen incentives for job creation. The same can be done for local governments. This has been proposed in Massachusetts.

LP: How does this idea win support across the political spectrum?

JB: I use the term “libertarian socialism” to describe the underlying philosophy behind carbon dividends. The concept is libertarian in its respect for the individual, and socialist in its commitment to equality. Today the labels “libertarian” and “socialist” are usually affixed to opposite ends of the political spectrum. But there is a strong connection between the egalitarian distribution of power and the egalitarian distribution of wealth, central tenets of liberty and socialism, respectively. Carbon dividends are consistent with both.

In the U.S., carbon dividends have gained support on both sides of the political aisle. The Cantwell-Collins bill was the last bipartisan climate legislation proposed in the Senate. A new House bill called the Energy Dividend and Carbon Dividend Act is co-sponsored by a Democrat and a Republican. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who championed carbon dividends as a Congressman, has proposed a new bill in the Senate. Republican elder statesmen George Shultz and James Baker are among the co-authors of “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” a proposal advanced two years ago by the Climate Leadership Council (CLC). The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a non-partisan advocacy group, has been working to build grassroots support for carbon dividends around the country.

In my view, bipartisan support is essential if climate policy is to be politically durable. An effective climate policy cannot be a one-off victory: it must endure long enough to see the clean energy transition to its conclusion. A policy that is vulnerable to being scrapped when there is a change of power in Washington won’t cut it.

The Yellow Vest movement that broke out in France last November was sparked by the Macron government’s announcement of a fairly modest increase in fuel taxes. The reaction is a loud and clear warning of the dangers in any policy that combats climate change at the expense of working people. Political leaders and clean energy advocates around the world have taken notice. German Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock recently said, “the lesson from France is that we cannot save the climate at the expense of social justice.” I think that is absolutely right. Carbon dividends are a way to combine the two.

LP: How do we overcome the big-money influence of those invested in the fossil-fuel economy? Who is currently supporting carbon dividends and who is opposed?

JB: Good question. For starters, it’s important to distinguish between capital and labor. Fossil capital faces losses in the form of stranded assets: plant and equipment, and reserves in the ground, whose market value will fall in some cases to zero in the clean energy transition. I don’t feel overly sorry about this. It’s what happens to firms in a market economy when they make bad investment decisions. I hope that betting on continued use of dirty energy will turn out to be a really, really bad decision.

In the meantime, these firms had a pretty good run for their money.

Labor – and here I mean not only workers in the fossil-fuel sector but also communities that depend on them – is a different matter. The workers and communities that provided our energy in the past performed a great service. They need and deserve assistance as we shift to the clean energy economy. A just transition is a key component of the Green New Deal.

Fossil capital is likely to oppose any policies that would sweep its assets into the dustbin of history. The only way to overcome this opposition is to build a broad and deep alliance among everyone who puts the long-term well-being of our children, our grandchildren, and humankind ahead of the short-term greed of those who profit in the fossil-fuel status quo.

But it’s been interesting to see that some energy firms, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, came out in support of the Climate Leadership Council’s (CLC) “conservative case” for carbon dividends.

LP: Is that kind of support a sign that there’s something wrong with the idea of carbon dividends?

JB: It’s important to distinguish the baby from the bathwater. I think there are two specific features of the CLC plan that made it palatable to some oil-and-gas firms. The first is the initial carbon price: $40 per ton of carbon dioxide. This would be enough to spur the shutdown of coal-burning power plants in favor of natural gas-fired plants, expanding the market for gas producers, while not being high enough to make a serious dent in demand for transportation fuels. The plan was vague on how the price would increase over time, but for Big Oil $40 may be just about the sweet spot.

The second inducement was a curious line of legalese inserted in the CLC plan saying that carbon taxes “would make possible an end to federal and state tort liability for emitters.” There is no intrinsic connection whatsoever between a liability waiver and carbon dividends. I can only surmise that this was put in as a carrot for the corporations. If so, and if this was enough to get them to sign on, it reveals just how deep the anxiety runs in boardrooms about the prospect of being held to account for the colossal harm that fossil fuel corporations have inflicted on people and the planet. The precedents of Big Tobacco, the demise of Union Carbide after the Bhopal chemical disaster, and the bankruptcy of Johns-Manville Corporation due to asbestos liability are instructive here. I regard corporate liability as a valuable bargaining tool that should not be relinquished lightly.

In speaking to diverse audiences about carbon dividends, I’ve often been asked, “This seems like a great idea – why haven’t I heard of it before?” I explain that it’s because no one stands to get rich from carbon dividends. No big-money interests are paying anyone to publicize the idea. The only way we will get carbon dividends – and the only way we will see effective solutions to the climate crisis – is for the people to join together and demand them. That is the bottom-line message of the book.

Carbon Dividends: A Plan for Earth’s Survival that Can Survive U.S. Politics?

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COVID-19: Trump downplays U.S. outbreak, spurring new credibility test

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/covid-19-trump-downplays-u-s-outbreak-spurring-new-credibility-test/

COVID-19: Trump downplays U.S. outbreak, spurring new credibility test

President Donald Trump faces a critical challenge in grappling with the new coronavirus outbreak: Asking Americans to believe him after he and top advisers have contradicted federal scientists in playing down the threat.

The stakes could be enormous from a public health and economic perspective, and also for Trump’s personal credibility.

0:50 COVID-19: Pelosi says Trump’s action on Coronavirus is ‘too late’

COVID-19: Pelosi says Trump’s action on Coronavirus is ‘too late’

As Americans prepare for what experts say is an inevitable outbreak in the U.S., the X-factor may be an unpredictable president who has clashed repeatedly with scientists in his own administration and tends to see any crisis through the lens of his own reelection chances.

READ MORE: Trump to hold news conference on coronavirus after downplaying concerns

After two days of the stock market tumbling , Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to blame the media and Democrats for causing undue alarm and harming American financial markets.

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He singled out MSNBC and CNN for “doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible,” and added that ”incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape.”

The president scheduled an evening press conference to address how the administration is handling the virus threat.

In advance, Trump played down the mortality rate for a pathogen that has been confirmed to have killed 2,700 people globally. His top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, echoed Trump’s outlook, saying Tuesday that the U.S. had “contained” the threat of a domestic outbreak.

2:08 COVID-19 prompts new warnings in U.S.

COVID-19 prompts new warnings in U.S.

Trump’s and Kudlow’s comments were at odds with warnings from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who said that American communities need to prepare now for when the disease starts spreading domestically. So far, there have been just 60 confirmed cases in the U.S.

“The messaging by the White House is unhelpful,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “What the White House is doing is conveying a sense of overconfidence. … Of course, we do want to maintain calm with the public, but it flies in the face of facts. There is strong likelihood that we will see an outbreak in the United States and that we could see community transmission.”

Trump’s public efforts to project calm masked a behind-the-scenes focus.

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During his 36-hour visit to India, Trump received briefings from staff and periodically checked the impact on Wall Street, tweeting at all hours to try to reassure Americans and the markets about the spread of the virus.

READ MORE: Donald Trump says U.S. has coronavirus threat ‘well under control’

Trump expressed deep concern to aides about the impact on the markets, according to White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing. Trump has tied his fortunes to Wall Street more closely than any of his recent predecessors and has made a strong economy his No. 1 one argument for reelection.

As the media coverage of the virus has increased, Trump has grown concerned that even fears of an outbreak would stagger Wall Street, leading him to wonder aloud if Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was the right person to lead the administration’s response, the officials said.

The White House has considered naming a virus czar to be the point person on the disease, but is not sure that is the right route.

Since the start of the crisis, Trump has been reluctant to blame China, where the virus originated, for fear of upsetting President Xi Jinping or damaging ongoing trade talks.

2:11 Trump says Ebola and COVID-19 are like ‘day and night’

Trump says Ebola and COVID-19 are like ‘day and night’

But he is also fearful that he could be accused of being unresponsive to the crisis. At the urging of a number of his internal and outside advisers, he directed the White House to adopt a more public presence, leading to a briefing by officials and emails to the press stressing the administration’s response.

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“Americans want to see their president taking charge and showing leadership, and that is exactly what President Trump is doing,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany. “ In restricting travel and implementing quarantines, President Trump has taken unprecedented action to protect American citizens from the coronavirus.”

Privately, aides say concerns have spiked in recent days inside the Trump reelection campaign over the impact the virus could have on the November election.

The most pressing concern, aides said, is not the possibility of widespread outbreak in the U.S. _ Trump’s aides do believe existing monitoring and restrictions are working _ but the downstream effects of the virus on the global economy and public sentiment.

READ MORE: Coronavirus worries grow globally as WHO reports more cases outside China

The virus has already shut Chinese factories that are part of the U.S. supply chain, such that Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated Wednesday that U.S. growth could slow to 1.7% this year _ roughly the same level as in 2016. Zandi said the situation could become worse if a pandemic emerges.

“The U.S. economy is more insulated from the impact of the virus, but it is not immune, and it too would likely suffer a downturn in this scenario,” Zandi said.

Trump moved swiftly to severely curtail most travel to China a month ago, a move that administration officials believe slowed the spread of the virus to the U.S., even if it drew criticism for being too extreme in the moment.

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Until now, federal health authorities have been preparing for the coronavirus’ arrival in the U.S. with little if any White House interference. They’re following the playbook: pandemic preparedness plans that were put into place in anticipation of another flu pandemic, but that will work for any respiratory-borne disease.

1:17 Trump says U.S. has coronavirus under control, has confidence in China’s president to solve problem

Trump says U.S. has coronavirus under control, has confidence in China’s president to solve problem

Part of those plans call for educating the public on what to expect if the virus begins spreading in U.S. communities, such as school closures or calls for people to telework.

One of the lessons learned in prior crises is not to offer false assurances when scientists have questions about the illness.

As Trump plays down the threat of an outbreak, his past attacks on government scientists on everything from hurricane forecasts to climate change and his reputation for straining the truth all factor into the credibility of his message.

The flap over Trump’s off-base comments about Hurricane Dorian last fall — when he went so far as to display a weather map that had been altered with a black marker to extend the hurricane’s possible path — demonstrated the pitfalls when a president veers from the message provided by government scientists and career professionals.

READ MORE: At least 22 dead as India citizenship law protests swell during Trump’s visit

Trump, who pilloried President Barack Obama over his response to the Ebola epidemic, now finds himself having to fend off a wave of criticism from Democratic presidential rivals who claim he’s discounted science and has inadequate response plans.

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At Tuesday’s presidential debate, Mike Bloomberg claimed “there’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar criticized Trump for trying to cut back funding of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies like the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased.

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[dinafbrownil]

Trump Speech Offers Dizzying Preview Of His Health Care Campaign Strategy

President Donald Trump offered a preview of what his 2020 health agenda might look like in a speech Thursday — blasting Democratic proposals for reform and saying he would tackle issues such as prescription drug prices and affordability.

He outlined the pillars of his health care vision, which included protecting vulnerable patients; delivering affordable care and prescription drugs; providing choices and control; and improving care for veterans.

In the speech, delivered in The Villages, Fla., before the president signed an executive order to expand Medicare Advantage, Trump also took aim at overhaul plans being advocated by his Democratic opponents, claiming their approach would “put everyone into a single socialist government-run program that would end private insurance.”

He said he and Republicans are committed to protecting people who have preexisting conditions — a claim that PolitiFact and Kaiser Health News previously rated False, because of his administration’s policies.

And, in keeping with the Medicare Advantage theme, he spoke about a controversial move by the Obama administration to reduce future payments to that program by $800 billion. (This point, previously examined by PolitFact, was found to be Half True — but Trump didn’t note that the reductions didn’t affect the program’s beneficiaries, or that he has used a similar approach in projecting future Medicare spending reductions.)

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He challenged Congress to approve legislation to curb surprise medical bills and lauded improvements in the veterans’ health system.

But the speech included several other claims directed at Democrats and the currently buzzy proposal of “Medicare for All” that could easily have left some people befuddled. We broke down a few.

Trump told his audience that “Democrats are draining your health care to finance the open borders.”

We asked the White House for the basis of this remark and never got a specific answer. But there are various issues to examine.

In August, the president argued that Democrats “support giving illegal immigrants free healthcare at our expense.” But that isn’t accurate. The statement, part of a Trump 2020 television advertisement, was rated Mostly False.

That claim examined Democratic candidates who had said during one of the televised debates that their health care plans would provide coverage to undocumented immigrants. But the question posed by a debate host didn’t ask whether coverage would be free. In fact, multiple candidates said coverage for undocumented people would not be free. Some, meanwhile, include copays and deductibles in their health care proposals. Plus, if any Medicare for All plan was financed through, for instance, payroll taxes, undocumented immigrants would also be subject to paying those.

Trump argued that Democratic proposals for universal health care “would totally obliterate Medicare” — adding that “whether it’s single-payer or the so-called public option … they want to raid Medicare to fund a thing called socialism.”

The argument here is nuanced but, fundamentally, Trump’s characterization misses the mark and is misleading.

The “single-payer” bill he refers to is the Medicare for All proposal pushed by Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The bill would put all Americans — including the seniors currently covered by Medicare — into a single health plan. It would share Medicare’s name but look dramatically different: Unlike the existing program, the proposal envisions covering virtually all medical services and eliminating cost sharing. It would not be administered by private, for-profit contractors.

Predicting what this looks like is difficult since it’s grounded in hypotheticals. And one could argue that using the term “obliterates” is not completely off base because Medicare in its current form would no longer exist. But that misses the broader impact. Under the proposal as it’s written, seniors would be insured through a program at least as generous — if not more — than what they currently receive.

As for “public option” proposals put forth by candidates such as former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, they would leave Medicare more or less as it is, while also creating a public health plan uninsured people could buy into.

Describing Medicare for All, Trump said the plan would “reduce Americans’ household income by $17,000 a year.”

We contacted the White House to find out the source of this number. The administration acknowledged receipt but never sent an answer.

That said, it’s unclear where this number comes from, because the evidence simply doesn’t exist to make such a precise claim. After all, many details about Medicare for All are still being worked out. That makes it exceptionally difficult to figure out how much such a system would cost — let alone how an individual household’s finances might change under such a system. (This ambiguity is why the Congressional Budget Office has declined to estimate single-payer’s fiscal impact.)

And different households would likely make out differently under Medicare for All. Some might end up paying more. But others would likely pay more in taxes while still seeing their health care costs go down — meaning they could ultimately save money.

Trump said, “the Democrat plans for socialized medicine will not just put doctors and hospitals out of business, they will also deny your treatment and everything that you need.”

This statement relies on a talking point that’s been widely debunked.

We focused on the first part of this claim. Both conservatives and moderate Democrats have argued that single-payer health care, in particular, would drive hospitals and doctors to shutter en masse. (Conservatives have made this argument about a public option as well.) In a past related fact check, we rated this as False.

The argument springs from the way Medicare currently reimburses hospitals, at 87 cents for every dollar spent on health care. But the Sanders bill does not set a reimbursement rate, and instead would charge the federal government with devising an appropriate rate.

Some hospitals might struggle under a new system — but others, health care economists have previously told us, would likely do better.

“It really depends on which hospitals you’re talking about,” Gerard Anderson, a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in hospital pricing, told Kaiser Health News in July.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/trump-speech-offers-dizzying-preview-of-his-health-care-campaign-strategy/

[thisdaynews]

Inside the media industry’s struggle to take on Silicon Valley

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/inside-the-media-industrys-struggle-to-take-on-silicon-valley/

Inside the media industry’s struggle to take on Silicon Valley

Google and Facebook control 60 percent of online ad dollars and can decide the fate of newsrooms by tweaking their algorithms. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

technology

U.S. news companies are using a playbook from Europe to challenge the online platforms they see as an existential threat.

Executives from some of the biggest U.S. news organizations met with a British economist last fall at Washington’s exclusive Metropolitan Club to strategize on a mutual obsession: getting their industry out from under the thumb of Google and Facebook.

Over a breakfast of bacon and eggs in a private banquet room, executives from CNN, USA Today and Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones listened intently as Dame Frances Cairncross described how British publishers are navigating the internet giants’ domination of the news business, an attendee from the media delegation told POLITICO. During the session, the details of which have not been previously disclosed, Cairncross in turn sought the perspective of the American media for a report, commissioned by then-Prime Minister Theresa May, on the fate of journalism in the digital age.

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The meetingwas part of an ongoing campaign by news publishers in the U.S. and Europe to counter the growing power of Silicon Valley — a significant, if often overlooked, aspect of the anti-tech backlash brewing on both sides of the Atlantic. And it comes amid an existential struggle for most U.S. news companies, at a time when Google and Facebook control 60 percent of online ad dollars and can decide the fate of newsrooms by tweaking their algorithms.

The news companies’ efforts have taken many forms, including complaints with regulators and lawmakers in multiple countries about tech’s alleged antitrust or copyright violations. But the American publishers’ major focus at the moment is persuading Congress to grant them an exemption from antitrust law, which would let them combine forces to negotiate the terms of the online platforms’ use of their news content.

That effort, which recently got a plug from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, echoes the tactic behind a new European Union copyright directive that gives publishers greater economic leverage against tech. That EU law is the result of years of hit-or-miss efforts to combat what the media companies call a Google-Facebook “digital duopoly.”

U.S. media advocates say they have drawn major lessons from discussions with their European counterparts, including the need to band together and put aside their traditional rivalries.

“The European publishers have been ahead of us,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, which represents about 2,000 media organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere. “The biggest lesson learned is that you need collective action by the publishers. No one publisher, even a really big publisher, in itself can impact the relationship with the platforms. You need everybody to coordinate.”

The combatants include some of the media industry’s biggest players — among them the major German publisher Axel Springer SE as well as News Corp., the U.S. company founded by Rupert Murdoch that owns Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. (Axel Springer is the co-owner, along with POLITICO, of POLITICO Europe.) The involvement of such media powerhouses has inspired some eye-rolling among some Silicon Valley defenders in Washington, even if the vast majority of U.S. newsrooms have spent the past decade in an economic free fall.

“If only somebody would help Rupert Murdoch,” quipped Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of the tech trade group NetChoice, whose members include Facebook and Google.

Chavern, a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive, has repeatedly traveled to Europe to learn from his EU counterparts about their combat with tech. During a January trip to Berlin, he met with VG Media, a so-called collecting society that serves as a clearinghouse for fees owed to news publishers, and sat down with Axel Springer’s chief lobbyist, Dietrich von Klaeden.

Chavern said he plans to head back to the continent in the fall.

Meanwhile, von Klaeden has been to the United States more than a half-dozen times over the past year to explain the European media strategy and make the case for changes in Washington, he told POLITICO Europe in an interview.

Von Klaeden has spread the message in the U.S. that when it comes to news publishers’ dealings with Google and Facebook, it’s possible to “get the dollar to change direction.”

“It’s important for the U.S. to maintain the momentum,” said von Klaeden, who sits on the News Media Alliance’s board.

In February, shortly after Chavern returned from Europe, Cairncross issued the results of her investigation into the state of the British news industry. Among the conclusions of the 160-page report were that “the government must take steps to ensure the position of Google and Facebook does not do undue harm to publishers.”

The publishers’ efforts in the EU have already borne fruit. This spring, amid an intense lobbying campaign by the media and other industries, the European Parliament and European Council in Brussels adopted sweeping copyright legislation that includes a so-called publisher’s right provision, giving news organizations the right to demand payment for the small snippets of news that appear on Google News and elsewhere. Critics call it a “link tax.“

European media had years of misfires before getting some traction against the major internet companies. In 2014, Spain passed a law requiring payments to Spanish publications whose content populated Google News. Google reacted by shuttering the service there, and it remains closed.

But unlike in the Spanish case, publishers say that under the new EU-wide regulation, they’ll be in a position to trade payments for other concessions from the tech platforms, such as access to data collected on their digital audiences. (EU member states have two years from the date of passage to enshrine the directive into their national laws.)

In the U.S., the News Media Alliance is throwing its lobbying efforts behind a bill that would give publishers a time-limited exemption from antitrust law, allowing them to negotiate together to make content deals with online providers without being charged with illegal collusion.

The legislation represents a major change in the media companies’ strategy: Until recently, individual American publishers attempted to negotiate one-off, ad hoc deals with Google and Facebook in attempts to extract more money or more online readership data on better terms. It was, they say, an unsatisfying experience.

One thing going for American news organizations is that in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans began turning on Google and Facebook over everything from Russian election interference to the proliferation of online hate speech to, in the GOP’s case, unproven allegations of anti-conservative bias.

That anger is beginning to manifest itself in concrete action in Washington. In late July, the Justice Department announced a broad antitrust review of the major tech platforms; a person familiar with the situation said the media companies’ grievances are on the DOJ’s radar. A day later, after being hit by a $5 billion privacy fine from the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook disclosed that it was the subject of a new FTC antitrust investigation.

At least one media mogul isn’t waiting for regulators to take notice of the news industry’s unhappiness. News Corp. has in recent years complained to the European Commission about Google’s scraping of its news and has argued to Australian authorities that Silicon Valley firms need to be more heavily regulated. Last summer, the company urged the FTC to look into whether any of the online platforms are behaving like a “bottleneck monopolist” by dictating what kind of relationship news outlets have with their digital audiences.

News Corp. is also a member of the News Media Alliance and sits on its board. But Chavern said his group isn’t pinning its hopes on federal antitrust regulators in the U.S., whose investigations can take years to wrap up. (An FTC antitrust case against the chip maker Qualcomm begun in January of 2017 is still ongoing.)

“I’m not asking the government to do anything other than leave us alone,” said Chavern. “I’m trying to drive an immediate solution for news publishers to build a sustainable future.”

Still, the group has taken advantage of Congress’ growing interest in cracking down on tech companies to press its agenda.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chairman of the House Judiciary Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, chose to devote the first hearing of his wide-ranging tech industry investigation to the fate of the “free and diverse press.” Cicilline used the June hearing to call attention to the News Media Alliance’s proposed antitrust exemption, which he is sponsoring in the House.

In the Senate, the backers of the bipartisan legislation are Louisiana Republican John Neely Kennedy and Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

While getting any legislation through Congress at the moment is an uphill task, the House bill has gotten traction on the presidential campaign trail with Sanders, who linked to the measure in a recent op-ed, saying, “We must also explore new ways to empower media organizations to collectively bargain with these tech monopolies.”

And the tech industry is seeing the push for the antitrust exemption as enough of a threat to quietly lobby against it. That’s in part because the country’s publishers are a unique kind of Silicon Valley critic, with built-in high public profiles and longstanding political connections.

“We’ve worked for many years to be a collaborative and supportive technology and advertising partner to the news industry as it works to adapt to the new economics of the internet,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, saying the company drives tens of billions of clicks to news sites that spur ad revenue and subscriptions.

Facebook declined to comment on the record, but a person familiar with the company’s thinking said it believes that the proposed media antitrust exemption could lead to the sort of news blackouts that sometimes result from the breakdown in negotiations over cable programming.

The internet giants have lately touted a series of initiatives to work more closely with the media. In March 2018, for example, Google said it was putting $300 million into a “Google News Initiative,” which provides funding, training and digital tools to local news outlets. Facebook, meanwhile, is planning to launch a “news tab” under which the company will reportedly pay publishers for content.

To support the U.S. legislation, the News Media Alliance is connecting lawmakers with representatives of their local newspapers to make their case.

Kevin Riley, the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said he overcame the awkwardness of getting engaged in politics to talk to Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on House Judiciary, about the challenges facing his paper in the digital era. (Collins is a co-sponsor of the media antitrust bill.)

“You don’t want to be in a position that you’re lobbying people you cover, but I wanted him to know how important it was,” said Riley, who also testified at Cicilline’s hearing in June.

Riley said he stopped short of asking Collins to support the exemption: “The [News Media] Alliance can take it from there.”

Critics of the bills say Congress has been rightly reluctant to create loopholes in the country’s antitrust rules. And, they say, an exemption for publishers has been tried in the past, without much success. In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed an exemption allowing local news publishers to enter into joint operating agreements, which allowed competing newspapers in the same city to combine their business operations while maintaining separate newsrooms.

Some opponents charge that the move only shored up entrenched media giants to the detriment of up-and-coming outlets.

“Generally, society as a whole abhors cartels. So why pass a statute to create one?” said Jonathan Jacobson, a former member of the congressionally mandated Antitrust Modernization Commission, which warned in 2007 against such exemptions. (Jacobson, a lawyer in private practice, has Google as a client, though he said he isn’t speaking for it.)

But advocates for the measure say that times and circumstances have changed — and that newspapers and other media outlets, though crucial to American democracy, are in the untenable position of competing for revenue with the online platforms that distribute their content.

“I think the bargaining power between any individual publisher and a tech platform is just too vast,” said Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, an advocacy group critical of the tech industry.

The News Media Alliance had a high-profile misstep in its U.S. campaign. A study it released in June, which was featured in The New York Times, asserted that Google made about $4.7 billion off news publishers’ content in 2018. That number met with immediate skepticism, and the director of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab called the figure “imaginary.”

But the group says it’s seeing the political winds in the U.S. blowing in its favor. Chavern said board members recently told him they were encouraged to see the traction the group’s campaign is getting, urging him to “punch the gas.”

Matthew Karnitschnig contributed to this report.

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[jeroldlockettus]

A Free-Trade Democrat in the Trump White House (Ep. 271)

Gary Cohn was leaving the number two position at Goldman Sachs when he met with Donald Trump. But was this Wall Street veteran ready for the challenges of Pennsylvania Avenue? (Photo: Pool/Getty)

For years, Gary Cohn thought he’d be the next C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. Instead, he became the “adult in the room” in a chaotic administration. Cohn talks about the fights he won, the fights he lost, and the fights he was no longer willing to have. Also: why he and Trump are still on speaking terms even after he reportedly called the president “a professional liar.”

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Stephen J. DUBNER: So your life story, I guess, is pretty remarkable.

Gary COHN: Thank you.

DUBNER: You were not destined for—

COHN: For Wall Street.

DUBNER: For Wall Street.

COHN: Any street.

Gary Cohn was born in 1960 in the suburbs of Cleveland. He had severe dyslexia and was a terrible student. As a consequence, he bounced from school to school. If there were an award for “least likely to succeed,” Cohn might have qualified. His parents were worried he wouldn’t make it through high school. His grandparents ran an electrical-contracting business, where Gary worked after school. He was a whiz with inventory and anything else numerical.

COHN: As the rest of the world was telling me, “You’re going to be a disaster, you’re a failure, maybe you’ll be lucky to drive a truck,” my grandparents — who I really admired, who’d built the family business — they kept saying, “You’re going to be fine.” And they were great people in my life, really influential.

Cohn did make it through high school, and college — at American University, where he programmed computers and became obsessed with the financial markets. But back home in Cleveland, the best he could do was a sales job in the home-products division of U.S. Steel. On a work trip to New York, he stopped in at the commodities exchange, hoping to somehow land a job there. He hitched a ride to the airport with a stranger — a guy who’d just been put in charge of the new options-trading desk at his brokerage firm. He admitted to Cohn he didn’t know anything about options. Cohn replied that he knew everything about them. Which was a lie. But it got Cohn an interview, several days later. By then, it was no longer a lie: Cohn had read the definitive book on options trading four times over — an act of extreme stamina for a dyslexic. He got the job. Several years later, in 1990, Cohn was hired by Goldman Sachs. He wound up working at Goldman for 27 years, the last 10 as president and C.O.O. But it was the job he took in early 2017 that would make Gary Cohn a household name: director of the National Economic Council under President Trump. How did a Wall Street rationalist deal with a Fifth Avenue hyperbolist?

COHN: I treated the President of the United States the way I would have liked to have been treated. That’s how I dealt with him.

*      *      *

I spoke with Gary Cohn the first week in March. It was starting to look like the trade war between the U.S. and China might be moving toward a peaceful conclusion — although, that hasn’t happened yet. Also: there’d been yet another report of behavior unbecoming the President of the United States — this time, a New Yorker piece alleging that in 2017, Donald Trump had instructed Gary Cohn to get the Justice Department to block a media deal that Trump disliked. Cohn reportedly told chief of staff John Kelly, “Don’t you f—ing dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”

DUBNER: Have you communicated with the President since you left the White House?

Gary COHN: Yes.

DUBNER: Can you tell us anything about that?

COHN: We have a very amicable relationship. We usually talk about the economy. Sometimes about personnel. We’ve talked about personnel, and when he’s had to fill a job or two, I’ve talked to him.

DUBNER: I’m a little surprised to hear that you’re on such good terms with the President still, mostly because I read Fear by Bob Woodward. And you’re kind of the star of that book, or one of the stars of that book. The most famous story concerns you removing a letter that somebody drafted for the President to sign, a letter to the President of South Korea that would have terminated KORUS, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. So let’s hear your version of that. Is the reporting in Fear essentially true, and did you participate?

COHN: I’m not going to comment on that.

DUBNER: Do you want to comment on whether you participated in the writing of the book. Did you talk to Woodward or—

COHN: I’m not going to comment. I’ve said all I’m going to say on the Woodward book. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s sort of come and gone.

For the record, here’s what Cohn had to say when Fear was published: “This book does not accurately portray my experience at the White House. I am proud of my service in the Trump Administration, and I continue to support the President and his economic agenda.” But, also for the record: in Fear, Cohn calls Trump “a professional liar.” And in a meeting over steel tariffs, which Cohn vehemently opposed, here’s what he reportedly told Trump and Peter Navarro, the President’s favorite economist. “If you just shut the f— up and listen, you might learn something.” So how can it be that Cohn and the President are still on speaking terms?

COHN: I think the President is about results, and when he looks back at our time together, I was part of a team that got a lot done. We got tax reform done.

It also says something about the kind of businessman Cohn was: a team player, and not a backstabber; eager to debate the facts but quick to forget a fight; and a man who exercised substantial patience. At Goldman Sachs, he was heir apparent to the C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein, for many years.

COHN: So the story is: when I was asked by Lloyd and the board to become president, chief operating officer, Lloyd called me and Jon Winkelried into a room. We were co-’s at the time and said, “Guys, will you give me two years? I got to know you’re committed for two years.” And I said, “Lloyd, I’ll give you two. Two’s not hard. But you’ve got to understand, I think these are seven-to-10-year jobs. I don’t think these are lifetime jobs.”

DUBNER: And you did it for 10, correct?

COHN: I did it for over 10. And literally at seven years, I started getting a little antsy. Lloyd, at that point, ended up getting sick. And I wasn’t going to rattle the boat or rock the boat at all in year seven or eight, or maybe it was eight, nine—

DUBNER: He was treated for cancer. I don’t know if you were technically acting C.E.O. but you were essentially—

COHN: I did whatever I did to protect the firm. I went when I needed to go, I did what I needed to go. And to me the most important thing for Lloyd was for him to get healthy. We had worked together our whole life. But at that point, I was letting the board know that I wasn’t going to be here forever. So I sat down, and I made it clear that I would be gone by the end of the year.

DUBNER: Oh, regardless?

COHN: Yeah, I was going. And the Trump thing was pure lucky coincidence.

We should note two things here. The first is that Gary Cohn is a registered Democrat — although, to be fair, a Goldman Sachs Democrat isn’t exactly an Elizabeth Warren Democrat. Cohn did make a lot of campaign contributions to Democrats over the years, but also to lots of Republicans, including a political action committee called Every Republican Is Crucial. The second thing to note is that Donald Trump was the sort of businessman, prone as he was to bankruptcy and hyperbole, that Goldman Sachs avoided doing business with. According to William Cohan, who’s written a definitive history of the firm, “Goldman determined never to do business with Trump and conveyed that message to its new recruits.” Keep in mind this is the same Goldman Sachs that until recently was happy to do bond deals with the government of Venezuela. In any case, by the fall of 2016, Trump had emerged as the Republicans’ nominee for President.

COHN: So if you remember, after the convention in Cleveland, the first debate in September at Hofstra was supposed to be an economic debate. And remember, the operative word there is “supposed to.”

That’s when Cohn got a phone call from Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser.

COHN: And said, “Hey, we’re preparing the nominee for the economic debate at Hofstra. Can I come in and talk to you about what’s going on in the U.S. economy?” We had a mutual friend.

DUBNER: And what was your initial response to whatever the Trump economic ideas were at that point?

COHN: I clearly support deregulation. I clearly support lower taxes on corporate repatriation, redoing the tax system. So there were a lot of big, high-level things I supported on the economic side.

TRUMP: You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history. You are going to drive business out. Your regulations are a disaster. And by the way, my tax cut is the biggest since Ronald Reagan.

DUBNER: Then on the other hand, there was trade and tariffs and immigration and so on.

TRUMP: NAFTA is the worst trade deal, maybe ever signed anywhere.

COHN: On the flip side there were things that I support on Hillary Clinton’s side, and things that I didn’t support on Hillary’s side. And it was interesting, when Jared called, I walked down three offices to the chief of staff of the executive office of Goldman, John Rogers, a political veteran, and I said, “Hey, John, should I meet with him?” And he’s like, “He’s the Republican nominee. If the Democratic nominee called you’d meet with her too right?” I go, “Yeah. Okay.” “So go meet with him.”

DUBNER: Were you not put off at all by the fact that he was considered by a lot of people to be, whatever adjective you want to use — I mean, the most anomalous major party candidate we’ve had probably ever.

COHN: But he was still the nominee.

DUBNER: Right.

COHN: He was still the Republican nominee for president.

DUBNER: But I’m asking you if you were put off as you — reputationally, for Gary Cohn or for Goldman — whether that was a consideration.

COHN: And that’s why I went, and I asked John Rogers who really is one the most astute political guys I knew — had been in and around Washington forever, been in the Treasury, been in the White House. I said “John, should I do this?” He goes, “What are you asking me? Of course you’re going to do this. If any nominee for president calls you from one of the major parties you’re going to meet with them.” And I didn’t meet with him. I met with his advisers.

Once Trump was elected, Cohn did meet with him. The meeting went very well — even though Cohn is what Trump calls a “globalist,” a believer in free, fair, and open trade. Trump had essentially run against that position. But Cohn’s views on deregulation and tax reform — especially lowering the corporate rate — they were exactly what Trump wanted to hear. Cohn also tried to pitch Trump on preparing for the huge disruption that automation will bring to labor markets; and the need to maintain a strong flow of immigrants.

According to the Woodward book Fear, Trump was so enthusiastic about Gary Cohn that he offered him a number of jobs then and there: deputy secretary of defense; director of national intelligence; secretary of energy; director of the Office of Management and Budget. “You know what?” Trump finally said. “I hired the wrong guy for treasury secretary. You would be the best treasury secretary.”

This must have been a bit awkward: as Woodward reports, Trump’s pick for treasury secretary was also in the room — Steve Mnuchin, another Goldman Sachs alum. Cohn didn’t accept any post at the meeting. But some time afterward, he was offered the role formally known as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council. By this time, remember, Cohn was already on the way out at Goldman Sachs.

COHN: The meeting with Donald Trump happened after I’d already made my decision. So I was in motion.

DUBNER: Did anyone say to you, however, “Gary, this president is anomalous, and he is a human third rail, and what are you thinking about?” Did anyone say that to you?

COHN: Of course.

DUBNER: And what did you say?

COHN: I said, “The President of the United States has asked me to work for him. I am going to go in and serve and do the best I can for my country.” Remember, I am taking an oath to the Constitution of the United States to protect and defend, not an oath to the President of the United States. And I am going to go serve the people of the United States.

The Trump White House turned out to be stranger than Cohn, or anyone, could have imagined.

COHN: The White House in itself is an amazing organization in many ways. It’s the craziest organization under any presidency, and it’s an amazing organization under any presidency.

Under Trump, workflow was unpredictable. Protocol was ignored. Turnover was endemic. People started calling Gary Cohn “the adult in the room”: disciplined, focused, and most of all dedicated to tax reform, a goal he shared with the President. Even if their numbers didn’t line up.

COHN: This is not a secret that at one point he wanted a 15 percent corporate tax rate. And I just told him a 15 percent corporate tax rate will not work.

DUBNER: Will not work — will not raise enough money, or politically?

COHN: It just a) politically and b) algebraic. I mean, when you start understanding the numbers of what a 15 percent tax rate means, we’d have to manipulate so many other things in the code. So, I personally would have settled for 25. The corporates would have settled for 25.

He then said, “Okay. I could live with 20. But if you —” and he was talking to Mnuchin and I at the time, he said, “If you guys start at 20, you’ll end up going higher. I know you. I know you can’t negotiate that well.” I said, “If we start at 20, we’ll end up at 20, we’ll hold it. We’ll hold it.” And we were holding 20. He was the one that kept willing — he was willing to go higher.

DUBNER: So what did it end up, 22?

COHN: Twenty-one. Yeah, 21.

Cohn also helped manage the political process, making sure the President’s habit of insulting people via Twitter didn’t undermine Congressional support for the tax plan.

COHN: When we were really working taxes hard, there was no way I could deal with the president going after any one of those Republican senators — I need every one of their votes. I don’t have a spare.

DUBNER: So did you steal his phone? What did you do?

COHN: No, no, no. We and Secretary Mnuchin and others, we kept reminding him. That was one of the reasons that we didn’t do anything in tariffs in the first year, is because a lot of our marginal voters are free-traders. And we didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to hold up a tax vote because they were going to retaliate on trade in the tax vote.

While putting together the tax plan, just eight months into Trump’s term, came a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

MARCHERS: Anti-white, anti-white, anti-white.

MARCHERS: Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.

There were counter demonstrations as well, and violence. Trump’s response is now infamous.

TRUMP: You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.

And it did nothing to ease the tension; Gary Cohn, by the way, is Jewish.

DUBNER: From what I’ve read, you were ready to resign then, and kind of had to be talked out of it. You were talked out of it.

COHN: Yeah, we had had two or three, I would say, very intense, very open, very honest discussions. And it boiled down to the president asking me, as his leader of tax reform in the White House and the person that he felt could help him get it done, to please stay on through tax reform.

DUBNER: All right.

COHN: And I did agree to that.

Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on Dec. 22 of that year. It got through Congress without a single Democratic vote. In addition to lowering the corporate rate, it also incentivized U.S. firms to repatriate money they’d parked overseas, and to invest some of that money here. It also lowered personal tax rates across the board, including a dip at the highest income level. The Joint Committee on Taxation projects the new tax law will be very generous to the very wealthy. But Cohn — who is himself very, very wealthy — he argues with that perception. Indeed, some of the new provisions hurt high earners: a lower cap on the the mortgage-interest deduction and a new $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax Deduction, or SALT, which is especially punitive to high earners living in high-tax states — states, by the way, that did not vote for Trump in 2016.

COHN: There was a very big tech company in California I was at two weeks ago, where all the senior management was bitching at me because how much their taxes are going up. I said, “Please tell Nancy Pelosi, because she was the first one that came out and said this was a tax cut for the rich.” Well, it was not a tax cut for the rich in San Francisco and it was not a tax cut for the rich in New York City or in Illinois. One of the ways that we made the tax tables work, and we pushed money down into lower-income brackets, is you have to find revenue. We found revenue in this deduction, which if you see who it affects, the vast majority of the people it affects are the high-income earners.

DUBNER: Big question: it’s been a while now, too early for big macro results, but how do you think your tax plan is working so far?

COHN: I’m glad you say that, that it’s too early, because it’s amazing how everyone wants to take a 10-year tax plan and judge it after one year. We talked about increasing economic growth by one percent. And I think in essence we did that in the first year. We went from sort of two to sub-two percent to three and just below three-percent growth. We finally have real wage growth, wage growth in excess of inflation in the United States. It’s still not as high as we’d like to see it. We’re seeing job creation. We’re seeing movement in the labor force. And I do think that we’ve seen that disposable income in the system.

So when you look at corporate earnings and you look at what’s going on in the stock market, a lot of that’s being driven by excess disposable income because of the tax rates. And I will be happy to be criticized if I’m wrong in the tax system, but we won’t know for five-plus years. We gave companies 100 percent of capital-expenditure expensing for the first five years, trying to get companies to make a long-term investment in the U.S. economy. And all we’re hearing right now is how U.S. companies aren’t paying taxes because they’re using that opportunity to invest in capital to manage their tax rate down. That is going to pay dividends for the next 20, 30 years.

*      *      *

Gary Cohn spent 27 years at Goldman Sachs, the massive investment bank and financial-services company. He never got the C.E.O. job he thought he’d get, but you probably shouldn’t feel too sorry for him. In 2007 alone, the first year of the financial crisis, Cohn’s compensation was $72.5 million. $72.5 million. In 2007. Goldman came through the crisis relatively well because of what came to be called “the big short,” a bet against the mortgage market whose collapse left so many other firms, and individuals, in big trouble.

DUBNER: Goldman hedged itself really well and really smartly. But for the average, let’s say, American voter, they look at Goldman and say “What are the goods and services that they provide? What value are they to me and why is a Gary Cohn, why is he making $72.5 million that year when the U.S. economy, the global economy, were starting to totally crater?” And many people really do think of Goldman as the giant vampire squid sucking the lifeblood out of anything that they can. So persuade me that the activities of a firm like Goldman are not essentially rent-seeking, and that the profits of such activities are not out of line with how we generally think of a society like ours, which creates opportunity for all.

COHN: I completely understand the question. I’m not offended. You can see — I get the question completely. The service we provide, and we are in the service industry, no different than other services that people pay for. And we are a service economy. We’re in the service of giving advice, intermediating, providing liquidity. And that’s what people were willing to pay for. And when we talk about that rent-seeking, it’s interesting because you even said it yourself in asking the question. The vast majority of the time we’re selling a bond. So on one hand, we’re representing Venezuela selling the bond, on the other hand, we’re finding buyers. So we literally have to do both sides of the transaction. And we are not taking a principal position in there. We are finding a buyer that will buy a Venezuelan bond at a certain interest rate. We’re talking to the Venezuelan Central Bank or the Treasury saying what rate will you issue at, and trying to find a meeting of the minds. And getting paid a fee in the middle which is fully disclosed to both the buyer and seller to do that.

DUBNER: We should say in that one case, Goldman may have been the last party to have been paid by the Nicolás Maduro government. Right? Isn’t that true. Probably.

COHN: I’ve been out there for a couple of years, but you may be—

DUBNER: I mean, it was a $90 million payment by Maduro. I think it was the last money that was made available for that kind of—

COHN: I’m not going to argue with you. You may be right.

To all the voters in 2016 captivated by Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp,” a man like Gary Cohn was the swamp, at least its New York outpost: the ultimate insider, wealthy beyond belief — and worse yet, he did not even share Trump’s nationalism.

COHN: It’s no secret, I am known as the globalist in the White House. Thank you Breitbart for putting little globes next to my name every time you print my name. It’s one of my crowning successes in the White House that I’m now known as a globalist, not a nationalist.

DUBNER: I don’t think it was a compliment, by the way, when they put it next to you.

COHN: It wasn’t a compliment for Breitbart. It was a compliment for me, though! It was a compliment for me though. So the fact that I’m a globalist, also I — that’s a synonym for realist. Because I believe we live in a globalized world and we’re not putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

The president ran on coal and coal jobs. I remember vividly having a conversation with the president on coal jobs versus solar-panel installers. We ended up putting tariffs on solar panels, which I didn’t understand either. And I did turn to him one day and I said, “Mr. President, how many coal miners do we have in the United States and how many solar-panel installers do we have?” And I said, “I’m not here to trick you up — the answer’s — I’ll make it simple: less than 50,000 coal miners in the United States and more than 350,000 solar-panel installers. And by the way, 10 years ago we had no solar-panels installers. It’s a growth industry in the United States. In fact in California now, you cannot build a house without solar panels. It’s an industry that’s going to continue to grow. And we have to recognize where this country is going, not where this country has been.”

DUBNER: And was his connection to that, what most people would consider an outdated belief, was that political, was it intellectual, was it just kind of spiritual?

COHN: I think it was all the above. I think during his formative years growing up, coal might have been an integral part in thinking about the energy sectors, but clearly in states like West Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania, he understood, and he was a bit of a marketing genius on this. He understood in West Virginia, and southern Ohio and Pennsylvania, you better go talk about coal. And he understood in certain steel towns, when he looked at the empty steel mills, he should talk about bringing back steel jobs.

The Trump plan to bring back steel jobs included placing tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum — along with solar panels and washing machines and hundreds of other imported goods, especially those made in China.

COHN: And when you put tariffs on goods that people in the United States consume every day, it’s a consumption tax. So all the tariffs did is they made products that Americans were going to buy more expensive. And in fact we got the final trade data numbers this morning for what trade deficit looked like for last year in the United States. And lo and behold, we hit an all-time record-high trade deficit globally, and with China.

DUBNER: Despite the best efforts of the White House.

COHN: Tariffs don’t work. If anything, they hurt the economy because if you’re a typical American worker, you have a finite amount of income to spend. If you have to spend more on the necessity products that you need to live, you have less to spend on the services that you want to buy. And you definitely don’t have anything left over to save. So we should try and make the goods as cheap as possible. And we don’t produce the goods in the United States; we import the goods from other countries. And if we could produce the goods as cheaply as other countries do, we would produce them in the United States.

DUBNER: Now, every Ph.D. economist that I’ve ever come across would agree — I would say, probably 99.5 percent — with what you just said.

COHN: No, I think 99.99999.

DUBNER: But the one that doesn’t, is in the White House, which is Peter Navarro, is that right?

COHN: There’s only one in the world. That we know of.

Peter Navarro is director of the White House National Trade Council, a position and office that Trump seems to have created specifically for Navarro. According to Bob Woodward’s Fear, Navarro referred to Gary Cohn as a “Wall Street establishment idiot.” Navarro’s other ally on tariffs was Wilbur Ross, the investor Trump had chosen as Commerce Secretary.

COHN: I was losing the war on tariffs every day with the President. I knew I wasn’t convincing him I was right. I was not going to take a 74-year-old man who’s believed something since he was 30 and convince him that I was right. Believe me, I tried. Don’t think I didn’t try. Don’t think I didn’t use every example I could try and use, from windows and buildings, to steel and buildings, to the bike manufacturer in Detroit. I used every example I could come up with.

DUBNER: We know that Trump has his ways of thinking. He admits that he’s not that interested in changing. We’ve read a lot about how you and others tried to educate him on things, give him new options, but at the end of the day it didn’t work. So what does that say about, I guess, either the president or the ability of our political system to absorb the best information?

COHN: Well, it definitely makes a statement about the power of the Executive Office and the presidency. And ultimately, everyone in the White House works at the pleasure of the president. And I was more than happy, I was actually excited to go in and fight with Peter Navarro every day and I was happy to be on the 99.9999 percent of the equation and explain and use real-life examples to what would happen.

DUBNER: And what would his defense be? Because it’s hard to defend — and, to be fair, there have been people in history, Copernicus, who were outliers, but they were right. Okay. Maybe that’s Peter Navarro’s view. What would his defense be?

COHN: Well his defense would be that he was the Copernicus, that he would be right. I don’t think you or I will live long enough to ever see him right. And the data just came out for last year that proves that so far he’s completely wrong. So far he’s been unable to show anyone any facts that he’s right.

DUBNER: And when the president sees these data, why does he not have a change of mind?

COHN: I don’t know. I mean data is data. Data — numbers really don’t lie. Yes, you can manipulate numbers, but these are numbers put out by his own Commerce Department. These are not your numbers, these are not my numbers. These are his numbers. His Commerce Department put out a 2018 trade deficit of $891-point-something billion. That’s an all-time record high. And the China number in there was the biggest single number, at an all-time record.

DUBNER: That number, however, coincides with a newly, I guess, resurgent stock market you could call it. Really, that’s not even fair. It had a brief downfall.

COHN: Yeah.

DUBNER: It had a one-month decline.

COHN: We had a bad December.

DUBNER: It was a bad December.

COHN: Bad December.

DUBNER: We happen to be speaking now in early March, let’s just pretend for a minute that there’d been a bad January and bad February, too. And let’s say the market had fallen 25, 30 percent overall. Do you think that would have substantially changed the President’s view on tariffs and trade, particularly on China? Because I can see how it might be easy to not worry about the deficit numbers when the markets are doing well.

COHN: You’re asking a really good, fun question. Yeah, what are the benchmarks for success of the presidency? The stock market is the most obvious, most transparent, most talked-about-by-the-president benchmark of success. We can debate how much the president should be accountable for the stock market going up or going down. I mean that’s an interesting debate.

DUBNER: All right. How about on the count of three, we both say a number, one to ten, how influential we think the president is overall, stock market. All right. I’m going to think of my number. You got your number?

COHN: Yeah. I got my number.

DUBNER: Okay. One, two, three.

COHN: Four.

DUBNER: Three. All right. So you’re even more cynical than I am.

COHN: Okay.

DUBNER: So that said, this president really uses it.

COHN: He really uses it. And he uses it more when the stock market’s going up, by the way, than he does when it’s going down. By the way, everyone does that.

What led to the strong market recovery after that bad December? Cohn attributes it to a number of factors: the end of a month-long partial government shutdown; indications that the trade war with China was moving toward a détente; and a decision by the Federal Reserve to stop raising interest rates.

DUBNER: It’s interesting because usually the chair of the Fed is, as we know, wildly independent. But here was a case where the president pretty much came out and said to Jay Powell, the chair of the Fed Reserve, “I would really prefer that you stop doing what you’re doing, and stop talking about raising interest rates.” What’s your view of that? And let me ask a two-part question. I know there was — I’ve read at least, that you were interested in that position at one point. I don’t know whether you were under consideration or not. You’re shaking your head no.

COHN: I am totally not the person to be the chairman of the Fed. That would be the worst position you could give to Gary Cohn.

DUBNER: Because you’re too excitable, or why?

COHN: No it’s a real, real, real academic position sitting with Ph.D. economists all day long and debating the economic tilt/slant micro of the U.S. economy. It’s not my skill set. One of my successes in life is knowing what I’m good at, and more importantly knowing what I’m not good at. I would not have been good at that job.

DUBNER: Okay. I totally take you at your word there. That said, did you consider it — and I don’t mean to assail Jay Powell here, but was it essentially — a “cave” is a strong word, but was it a capitulation based on the President’s wishes, and should the Fed work that way?

COHN: I’m going to hope it wasn’t. I’m going hope it wasn’t. I’m going to hope that Jay Powell and the Fed governors in seeing all of the data they see — I mean, they’ve got more Ph.D. economists than anyone else. They talk to all the companies in the world and the United States, and the regional Fed system is designed to bring them real-time data from the local economies. I surely hope, and I almost pray, that what the Fed did was in reaction to what they were seeing in the data, that they felt that there was an actual slowing of the economy and they were in the wrong place.

After a year in the White House, with tax reform done, Gary Cohn decided he’d had enough.

COHN: The chronology goes something like this: We signed tax reform on Dec. 22, it was a Friday.

DUBNER: 2017.

COHN: 2017. President left for Mar-a-Lago for vacation. I left with my family for vacation. We all came back in early January. And I sat down and had a one-on-one lunch with the President. And I was at the point now where I was getting ready to move on. And I said “I want to work with you to make sure there’s a smooth transition, that you hire someone. I’m happy to work with you to transition that person and I’ll leave as soon as you need me to, or I’ll stay as long as you need me to.”

DUBNER: And was this with the understanding that you were essentially losing the war on the trade war?

COHN: No, no. It really wasn’t. It was with the understanding that my main mission of getting tax reform had been done.

Cohn’s replacement was named: Larry Kudlow. And Cohn received a pat on the back from the President.

TRUMP: This is Gary Cohn’s last meeting in the cabinet and of the cabinet. And he’s been terrific. He may be a globalist, but I still like him.

Just to be clear, Cohn was losing the war on the trade war. But he says the reason he left the White House was because of how he was losing.

COHN: The most important thing to me — and this is the way I’ve always lived my life, whether I was at Goldman Sachs or I was at the White House — is you have to have a set of policies and procedures to debate issues. And as long as you abide by the sets of policies and procedures to debate the issues, and everyone gets their ample opportunity to express their point of view in an open forum, that’s a perfectly legitimate environment to work in.

DUBNER: The best idea wins.

COHN: And you’re never going to win every argument. You’re never going to win every fight. But you’re part of a team. And when the team decides you’re going to do X versus Y even though you’re passionately think that Y is right and X is definitely wrong, you have to be a team player. When I worked at Goldman Sachs for 27 years, it is the most team-oriented place in the world. So I believe in that team-oriented approach. What happened in the White House is we got to a point, unfortunately, where one or two people decided that they were going to no longer be part of a process and a debate. And they were going to use a direct connection to the president to set up a meeting and call in C.E.O.’s of aluminum companies and steel companies to announce steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs without there being a process and a procedure to set up that meeting; without the chief of staff knowing there was a meeting; without the Office of Legal Counsel having written an executive order or a memo or anything to sign. And they created that meeting without anyone knowing it.

DUBNER: These were [Peter] Navarro and Wilbur Ross? Are those the two people?

COHN: Yes. Those are the two people. When the process breaks down, then you’re, sort of, in my mind, living in chaos. I don’t want to live in a chaotic organization. I’ll live in an organization where people vehemently disagree all day long, as long as there’s a policy to vehemently disagree. When people start end-running the process and start trying to take over, that’s not an organization that I wanted to be part of.

Since Cohn left the White House, a pattern has emerged: the Trump administration uses tariffs, or the threat thereof, to leverage trading partners to renegotiate an old deal, like NAFTA, or substantially reconfigure the trading dynamic, as is the case with China. When I spoke with Cohn, there was a lot of talk that a new Chinese deal was potentially close; that sentiment has since receded. Still, I asked him: is it possible that a better U.S.-China trade deal will come about, and that it wouldn’t have been possible without the tariffs he despises?

COHN: There’s absolutely a possibility that that happens. The one thing the president and I completely, 100 percent agree upon is the Chinese stealing of intellectual property, the forced technology transfer into China, the market access for businesses into China. That has been a huge issue for the United States for years. And the president and I completely agree on the biggest problem with China. I’m not here defending China and China policy and China tactics. I have been on the other side of the store Chinese issue for a long time, I just differ on how we get to a conclusion.

DUBNER: What would you have proposed that’s different? Again, nothing’s been resolved as we speak. But basically, tariffs were used as a threat, essentially. That may have—

COHN: Here’s my problem with this. So tariffs were used as the threat. Did it hurt the Chinese at all? We had record trade deficits.

DUBNER: So why do the Chinese seem to be, at least at this point, amenable? Or is that a smokescreen?

COHN: I think the U.S. is desperate right now for an agreement.

DUBNER: An agreement or headline?

COHN: The president needs a win. The only big open issue right now that he could claim as a big win that he’d hope would have a big impact on the stock market would be a Chinese resolution. Getting the trade deficit down I will never say is easy, but of the issues on the table, that’s relatively easier. Getting the intellectual property, the forced technology transfer and the market access — much more difficult. I think market access, the Chinese will give because they’ve been close to giving it for a while. But how are we going to stop the Chinese from stealing intellectual property or not paying for it? How are we going to stop them from copyright infringement? What is the enforcement mechanism and what are the punitive damages if they don’t stop?

On balance, however, Cohn remains essentially a fan of President Trump’s economic agenda.

COHN: The president has come in and looked at the tax system, and looked at the economy, and looked at the regulatory environment, and said, “Hey can we, can we as a federal government, can we help stimulate economic growth?” Something that the prior administration had tried for eight years and never really got. So the president did come in and say, “I do believe in creating a stronger America. I do believe in creating jobs at home. I do believe in wage growth. And I do believe in making America more competitive.” And so those are things that he has executed on. And you have to give him credit. We continue to have a pretty robust market, a pretty robust economy. There’s a couple things going on in the U.S. that don’t really get the attention they deserve. There’s one report that everyone in Washington, the geek world, sort of hangs on. It’s called the JOLTS report, it’s jobs open, jobs lost. We have 7.3 million job openings in the United States. These are like $50-, $60-, $70,000 jobs with benefits.

DUBNER: So this points to you — you’ve always been pro-immigration generally, anti-wall.

COHN: Yep.

DUBNER: Did you try hard on that fight with the President, or—

COHN: I tried a little bit, but honestly I tried to stay in my lane of the economy. If I had bullets to shoot, I want to shoot them on the economy.

DUBNER: I mean it’s pretty easy to argue that immigration is a major part of the economy.

COHN: So we have 7.3 million jobs openings in the United States. We have 6.3 million unemployed people. If all those people were capable of working, which they’re not, we still have a million more jobs than people to fill them. So we need a million immigrants today just to balance the equation. So this is pretty simple to me.

And then I think back — think about my grandparents. They’re all immigrants. They were the ones that helped build this country. This country was built by some natives, but we had a huge immigrant population that came in. And were really all the construction in this country. All the homes, all the bricklayers, the electricians, the plumbers, most of them were immigrant labor and were willing to work 60, 70, 80, 90 hours a week. And willing to get dirty and work and most of those people built good businesses and did very well for their families.

Cohn’s grandmother, he told me, recently died, at age 106.

COHN: If I live to my grandmother’s age, I’ve got 50 years left.

DUBNER: All right, so, do you have a plan for your remaining half-century?

COHN: I don’t know if I have a plan, but I’m doing lots of interesting things.

DUBNER: So you’re investing.

COHN: Yes.

DUBNER: You’ve always done a lot of philanthropy and you’re doing that now. You’re teaching some.

COHN: I’m teaching.

DUBNER: What about politics, per se?

COHN: I mean, I’m not an elected official and I never intend to be an elected official. Let’s make sure about that. I don’t think I would ever — I know I would never run for anything. If I could serve my country again, I would never rule that out. I think it’s one of the greatest honors that you can have is to serve your country.

DUBNER: Treasury Secretary, maybe?

COHN: I’m not gonna say yes, I’m not going to say no. But there’s lots of ways to serve your country.

DUBNER: You went in obviously with your eyes open, knowing that there would be substantial disagreements or differences. What — did your expectation—

COHN: Let me stop you there. Because you don’t know that, right?

DUBNER: Even on trade and tariffs you didn’t—

COHN: I knew we would fight. But again, I’m not sure I knew for sure that the Donald Trump that ran for office would be the Donald Trump I got when he got to the White House. I didn’t know. I didn’t know if he was going to moderate. I didn’t know if the pressure of McConnell and Ryan and McCarthy was going to be able to move him. I just didn’t know for sure what was going to happen.

DUBNER: Give yourself a grade.

COHN: Oh, that’s a good question. I never got an A in my life so I can’t give myself an A now. I got a lot of D’s. I think I’m moving out of the D category. I’ll give myself a B. That’s a good grade for Gary Cohn.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Gary Cohn, former Director of the National Economic Council and former president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs

RESOURCES

Money and Power by William Cohan (Doubleday 2011).

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown 2013).

Fear by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster 2018).

EXTRA

“Why the Trump Tax Cuts Are Awesome/Terrible (Part 1)” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Why the Trump Tax Cuts Are Terrible/Awesome (Part 2)” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post A Free-Trade Democrat in the Trump White House (Ep. 271) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/cohn/

[michaeljtraylor]

Jay Powell heads to the Hill

Editor’s Note: This edition of Morning Money is published weekdays at 8 a.m. POLITICO Pro Financial Services subscribers hold exclusive early access to the newsletter each morning at 5:15 a.m. To learn more about POLITICO Pro’s comprehensive policy intelligence coverage, policy tools and services, click here.

Powell prep — Fed Chair Jay Powell kicks off two days of hearings on Tuesday, this time before Senate Banking. Powell is not likely to veer much from his stance that the central bank could be done hiking this year depending on data and that balance sheet reduction may stop later this year.

Story Continued Below

He’s more likely to make news on the regulatory front where senators will press him on tailored regulations and stress tests. Out top Fed watcher Victoria Guida emails: “It’ll be interesting to see how he responds to a probable question from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on whether the Fed will keep the growth cap on Wells Fargo unless they fire CEO Tim Sloan.”

China impact on the Fed? — President Trump on Monday continued to signal that a China deal is coming, tweeting that talks are in “advanced stages” and that “American farmers will be treated better than ever.” Tons of details remain to be worked out and internal squabbling over the verification mechanism will continue.

But Trump desperately wants to announce a big purchase of soybeans and other farm goods. USTR Bob Lighthizer and other hawks might be annoyed but they are going to have to deal with it or walk.

What will Powell do? — The big question going forward is will Powell and the Fed rethink their pause now that the happy China talk has push market indices out of their December doldrums and back close to all time highs? They stopped hiking in part based on tightening financial conditions that are not longer tight.

GOOD TUESDAY MORNING — Greetings from Las Vegas where somehow it’s only like 40 degrees. Email me on [email protected] and follow me on Twitter @morningmoneyben. Email Aubree Eliza Weaver on [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @AubreeEWeaver.

MM hosts a session on the Trump economy with Moody’s economist Mark Zandi and Heritage Foundation’s Steve Moore at the Structured Finance Industry Group meeting here in Vegas at 11:00 a.m. PST … Powell testifies before Senate Banking at 10:00 a.m. … House Financial Services has a hearing on credit bureaus at 10:00 a.m. …

POLITICS IN ONE MINUTE — Check out my latest U.S. Politics in Sixty Seconds video for GZeroMedia here.

GOP may get relief on refunds — Republicans continue to get hammered on the decline in tax refunds. But help may be on the way as the numbers could get better for the GOP .

Per Morgan Stanley: “[T]he slow start to the tax refund season may not be indicative of what’s to come in the next few weeks. Last year’s data shows that the largest surge has tended to come at the end of February. … As the EITC and ACTC refunds start to arrive, we expect a significant surge of refunds in the next few weeks.”

DEMS TO PROBE TRUMP FINANCES — Our Zachary Warmbrodt: “House Democrats are planning to cross one of … Trump’s red lines: investigating his personal finances. With special counsel Robert Mueller expected to wind up his probe soon, Democrats are launching an investigation to discover why Deutsche Bank was willing to lend The Trump Organization money when other banks weren’t and whether Russia was involved.” Read more.

MORE POWELL PREP — Center for American Progress’ Gregg Gelzinis: “Lawmakers should question Powell on the Fed’s proposals to reduce big bank capital requirements and weaken stress testing, as well as the Fed’s stance on bank consolidation, persistent misconduct in the financial sector, and the concerning increase in hedge fund leverage over the past two years.” Read more.

CNBC’s Ylan Mui reports on Powell’s year-long charm offensive on the Hill.

YELLEN DISSES TRUMP— Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen (who is also in Vegas today and will speak in a private session at the SFIG meeting), in an interview with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal:

“I doubt that he would even be able to say that the Fed’s goals are maximum employment and price stability, which is the goals that Congress have assigned to the Fed …

“He’s made comments about the Fed having an exchange rate objective in order to support his trade plans, or possibly targeting the U.S. balance of trade. And, you know, I think comments like that shows a lack of understanding of the impact of the Fed on the economy and appropriate policy goals.” Read more.

DEMS PRESS CREDIT AGENCIES — Also from Zach: “House Democrats this week are kicking off work on the biggest overhaul of the consumer credit reporting industry in years, marking the first major legislative effort launched by new Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters” Read more.

The 2020 Election. The new Congress. The Mueller investigation. … Keep up with POLITICO Playbook. Be in the know. Sign up today here.

WARREN REJECTS FUNDRAISING TACTICS — Our Natasha Korecki: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced … her campaign will shun fundraising through some of the old-fashioned means: dinners, donor calls and cocktail parties. In an email to supporters Monday, Warren also said she won’t sell access to big-name donors as candidates often do to raise money for a presidential bid.

“Warren has demonstrated as much in organizing events where she poses for photos with anyone who stands in line and requests it. Typically, candidates put a premium on such access, sometimes charging thousands of dollars for a personal photograph.” Read more.

SANDERS PLEDGES TO RELEASE TAXES — Our Holly Otterbein: “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised on Monday to release 10 years’ worth of tax returns during his campaign for president, but he didn’t say when he would release them.” Read more.

STOCKS CLOSE HIGHER — AP’s Damian Troise and Alex Veiga: “Stocks closed modestly higher Monday after shedding most of the gains from an early rally spurred by the Trump administration’s decision to hold off on increasing tariffs on imported Chinese goods. …

“Technology companies and banks accounted for much of the market’s gains, outweighing losses in consumer goods stocks and other sectors. Oil prices fell sharply after … Trump said they were getting too high. On Friday, oil closed at the highest level since mid-November.” Read more.

This rally has everything (except investors) — NYT’s Matt Phillips: “Armchair investors have been selling stock. So have pension funds and mutual funds, as well as a whole other category of investors — nonprofit groups, endowments, private equity firms and personal trusts.

“The stock market is off to its best start since 1987, but these investors are expected to dump hundreds of billions of dollars of shares this year. So who is pushing prices higher? In part, the companies themselves.” Read more.

SEC TARGETS MUSK (AGAIN) — NYT: “The [SEC] … asked a federal court to hold Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, in contempt of court for violating a settlement he and the company reached with the commission last year. The S.E.C. said Mr. Musk published erroneous information about Tesla’s production goals for the year in a Twitter post on Feb. 19 without first seeking approval from the company’s lawyers as he was required to do under the settlement.” Read more.

THE LATEST DEBT CAP DILEMMA — Bloomberg’s Alex Harris: “Uncle Sam has to find a way to shovel more than $100 billion in cash out the door by the end of this week. That’s when the U.S. Treasury has to reduce its cash balance to about $199 billion in order to comply with rules surrounding the reinstatement of the debt ceiling.

“The cap is set to go back into effect at the end of this Friday and at that point the cash balance should be at or below the level it was at when the current suspension went into effect in February 2018. The Treasury’s cash hoard ended last week at around $312 billion, leaving around $113 billion to reach its target.” Read more.

TRUMP ORG DONATES NEARLY $200K — AP’s Bernard Cohen: “President Donald Trump’s company said on Monday that it donated nearly $200,000 to the U.S. Treasury to make good on its promise two years ago to hand over profits from foreign governments using its properties.

“The Trump Organization said a check for $191,538 sent to Treasury represents profits from embassy parties, hotel stays and other foreign government spending at its Washington hotel and other properties last year. The voluntary donation is up from $151,470 sent a year ago to cover the president’s first calendar year in office.” Read more.

BOFA REBRANDS — Reuters’ Imani Moise: “Bank of America Corp is dropping the ‘Merrill Lynch’ name from some of its businesses, phasing out a brand with a long history on Wall Street as part of a multi-year marketing effort, the lender said on Monday. The investment bank and capital markets business is ditching the 104-year old name to become BofA Securities and its wealth management businesses will collectively be called ‘Merrill,’ without the Lynch.” Read more.

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[warninggraphiccontent]

24 July 2020

Missing numbers

Investment in preventive services, like children's centres and youth services, could make a real difference to children's lives - but the lack of consistently good-quality data makes it difficult frontline staff, local authorities and central government to understand what works.

That's one of the conclusions of a new report I've published with my colleague Colm and the excellent team at Nesta. We hope that as well as being useful to those in the children and young people's sector, the findings - and the recommendations - will be useful more widely to people working with and thinking about data. There's a graphic for thinking about data in different ways, and everything.

In brief:

On the subject of Missing Numbers... you may remember the project launched last year by Anna Powell-Smith (Data Bites presentation here). This week, she's launched the Centre for Public Data which will look at improving data provisions in new legislation. It's a great idea. More details here.

Data has gone missing from DCMS (well, bits of policy, including 'government use of data' and open government), as responsibility has been transferred back to the Cabinet Office. My lukewarm take here.

We're missing Data Bites this August to give me/everyone a summer break. Back in early September. Watch back the archive here.

Flourish joined the ranks of those subject to missing attribution this week. They also join a very select group that includes Neil Kinnock.

In case you missed it, yesterday marked a year since Boris Johnson became Conservative leader, and today marks a year since he became PM. It's been another quiet year in British politics, etc.

Finally, Warning: Graphic Content will be missing from your inboxes over the next few weeks as I take whatever passes for a holiday in these strange times. There definitely won't be a newsletter next week, and it will be intermittent through August. Have a lovely summer (or whatever passes for that in the UK or wherever you are), and see you again soon!

Very best

Gavin

Today's links:

Tips, tech, etc

End of the office: the quiet, grinding loneliness of working from home (The Guardian)

Digital remote working - research findings (Essex County Council)

The home-working revolution: new normal, old divides?* (New Statesman)

How well does working in open work when working from home? (Nick Halliday and others)

Putting feeling into policy making (CSaP)

Make a mask (Reuters)

Graphic content

Viral content: coronavirus

Our history is a battle against the microbes: we lost terribly before we developed vaccines to protect ourselves (Our World in Data)

Where the Virus Is Sending People to Hospitals* (New York Times)

After the Recent Surge in Coronavirus Cases, Deaths Are Now Rising Too* (New York Times)

A Detailed Map of Who Is Wearing Masks in the U.S.* (The Upshot)

The World Is Masking Up, Some Are Opting Out* (Bloomberg)

The UK And US Were Ranked Top For Pandemic Preparedness. What Went Wrong? (Huffington Post)

How to Understand COVID-19 Numbers (ProPublica)

T-cells: the missing link in coronavirus immunity? (FT)

When a simple gif is possibly the only way to show something: news desk wanted a size comparison of antibody, virus and T cell (FT via Ian Bott)

Viral content: consequences

The psychological toll of coronavirus in Britain – a visual guide (The Guardian)

Which jobs can be done from home? (ONS)

Amid a Deadly Virus and Crippled Economy, One Form of Aid Has Proved Reliable: Food Stamps* (New York Times)

US airlines fly in different directions in middle-seat debate* (FT)

How Remote Work Divides America (Reuters)

The costs of coronavirus: Just how big is £190 billion? (House of Commons Library)

US politics

Race and America: why data matters* (FT Data)

What Coronavirus Job Losses Reveal About Racism in America (ProPublica)

Republicans And Democrats See COVID-19 Very Differently. Is That Making People Sick? (FiveThirtyEight)

New polling makes clear what Trump refuses to see: His pandemic response has been a political disaster* (Washington Post)

At least 76% of American voters can cast ballots by mail in the fall* (Washington Post)

Everything else

The Living Standards Audit 2020 (Resolution Foundation)

Ministerial directions (Oliver for IfG)

Civil service pay (IfG)

Location of the civil service (IfG)

How much warmer is your city? Behind the scenes of our climate change interactive (BBC Visual and Data Journalism)

Where does the British public stand on transgender rights? (YouGov)

Meta data

MOG OMG

Machinery of government change: government use of data (and commentary from me)

DCMS loses government data policy to the Cabinet Office (Computer Weekly)

Cabinet Office takes charge of government use of data again (Civil Service World)

Viral content: testing times

Coronavirus: England's test and trace programme 'breaks GDPR data law' (BBC News)

Coronavirus: Government admits its Test and Trace programme is unlawful (Sky News)

Government admits that NHS Test and Trace programme is unlawful* (Wired)

Viral content: the only way is app

Coronavirus: The inside story of how government failed to develop a contact-tracing app (Sky News)

Cheap, popular and it works: Ireland's contact-tracing app success (The Guardian - 'works'?)

Data collection in new Covid-19 app ‘troubling’ (Belfast Telegraph)

Coronavirus: New NHS England contact-tracing app may bring 'personal benefits' (Sky News)

Coronavirus: The great contact-tracing apps mystery (BBC News)

Isle of Wight infection rates dropped after launch of contact tracing app (The Guardian)

Government

A No10 data science unit could create more problems than it solves (Lewis for IfG)

DRAFT FOR DISCUSSION: Data to support policymaking (ODI)

Scotland’s Census to be moved to March 2022 (National Records of Scotland)

A few final reflections as Chief Statistician (Welsh Government Data and Digital blog)

Addressing trust in public sector data use (CDEI)

Driving forward trustworthy data sharing (CDEI)

The continuing excellent performance of the ONS in this pandemic... (Tom Forth)

ICO hails transformative year as average fine trebles (Computer Weekly)

Resources and tools (GOV.UK Design System)

Government sets out draft agenda for a 21st century tax system (HMRC, via Gemma)

Data ethics and AI guidance landscape (DCMS)

Creating great online services: how we test services in our research lab (Inside DVLA, via Oliver)

The digital government atlas 2.0: the world's best tools and resources* (Apolitical)

ICO launches self-assessment Freedom of Information toolkit (ICO)

Public services

Missing Numbers in Children’s Services: How better data could improve outcomes for children and young people (IfG/Nesta)

Health data chief says UK’s data deficit in social care during COVID-19 a “catastrophe” (diginomica)

Six months of binnovation in Leeds (ODI Leeds)

Big tech

The inside story of Babylon Health* (Prospect)

Should you delete TikTok from your phone? (The Guardian)

Uber drivers to launch legal bid to uncover app's algorithm (The Guardian)

Europe must not rush Google-Fitbit deal (Politico)

Recovery from Covid-19 will be threatened if we don't learn to control big tech (The Observer)

Vestager has tasted defeat, but she should not stop chasing Big Tech (The Observer)

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is working to launch a university that would rival Stanford and MIT and funnel tech workers into government work (Business Insider)

From Russia with ****

We need a single agency to be responsible for UK elections (Democracy Club)

The Russia report has shown our election laws are dangerously out of date (The Independent)

Sharing is caring

How Schrems II will impact data sharing between the UK and the US (Computer Weekly)

Further (unhappy) thoughts on Schrems II (Panopticon)

Applying new models of data stewardship to health and care data (ODI/The Health Foundation)

Frameworks, principles and accreditation in modern data management (Felix Ritchie and Elizabeth Green, UWE Bristol)

How Wikidata might help the Smithsonian with its mission to diffuse knowledge (Wiki Education)

Everything else

Professional standards to be set for data science (Royal Statistical Society)

Understanding Machine-Readability in Modern Data Policy (Data Foundation)

Data and the Future of Work (Common Wealth)

Talking about data (Citizens Advice)

We are facing a global crisis of widespread unverified information (DCMS Select Committee)

White Paper on Artificial Intelligence - a European Approach: contributions to the consultation (European Commission)

The UK address mess: a way forward? (Peter Wells)

Public attitudes to science 2019 (BEIS)

Opportunities

JOB: Head of Data Infrastructure (ESRC, via Catherine)

JOBS (HDR UK)

JOBS: Technology opportunities (ICO)

EVENT: Exploring data institutions: trustworthy, sustainable access to data (ODI)

And finally...

Sport and entertainment

Defining the ’90s Music Canon (The Pudding)

Empty stadiums have shrunk football teams’ home advantage* (The Economist)

Does home advantage exist without football’s partisan fans?* (FT)

Sneak preview: The Seinfeld Chronicles (Andy Kirk)

Politics

As it's #WorldEmojiDay, can you guess the Conservative MPs? (Conservatives, via Pritesh)

congrats to Newspoll, who, according to the Courier Mail's Sunday editorial, surveyed a whopping 124% of Queenslanders to find just 59% were satisfied with the Premier (Sinéad Canning, via Sarah)

Breaking: there is one new case of a disgraced politician in New Zealand (The Spinoff)

Everything else

Stop resisting it, editors - the vast majority of people say "data" should be treated as singular, not plural (YouGov)

We should start a competition (Maarten van Smeden, via Nick)

Food hazards from around the world data competition (University of Bristol, via a quantum of sollazzo)

Penguins (Allison Horst/Oli Hawkins)

Alright, let’s go back to hating pie charts. (Randy Olson, via Nick)

[msdantelboutique]

Gas tax hike backers say New Mexico roads need funding

Craig Meadows of Denver pumps $41.64 for a half-tank in his GMC Yukon at the Allsup’s station on North Guadalupe on Monday. New Mexico has not raised the tax on gasoline since 1993. This year, that could change. Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican

New Mexico’s government has not raised the tax on gasoline since 1993.

This year, that could change.

A sweeping tax bill sponsored by Democrats in the state House of Representatives would increase the tax on gasoline by 10 cents a gallon, from 17 cents to 27 cents, starting in mid-2020. The special fuels tax would go up a nickel, too, from 21 cents to 26 cents.

Backers say New Mexicans do not have to look any further than the wear and tear on the state’s highways for a reason to raise the tax, proceeds of which have traditionally paid for road maintenance.

But opponents contend the state has plenty of money to cover the cost of improving and building roads without putting the burden on taxpayers.

Economists expect the state will have more than $1 billion in additional revenue for the fiscal year that begins in July on top of hundreds of millions of dollars in a surplus for the current budget year. Some lawmakers argue a big chunk of that money should go towards infrastructure.

While plenty of lawmakers agree the state needs to spend money to improve its roads, the question is who should pay and how. Should New Mexico use the money it has now or also try to shore up a source of funding for the future?

“We’re way behind,” says Rep. Roberto “Bobby” Gonzales, a Democrat from Taos who has proposed increasing the gas tax in previous years and is a co-sponsor of this year’s legislation, House Bill 6. “We really need to catch up and to be safe.”

A report from the private nonprofit research group TRIP found that nearly half of New Mexico’s major local and state-maintained roads were in poor or mediocre condition as of 2017.

The same group estimated this had cost motorists around $900 million in vehicle depreciation, additional repair costs, increased fuel consumption and wear on tires.

Roads are a particularly pressing concern in southeastern New Mexico, where the bustle of an oil boom has taken a big toll on rural roads that were not designed for parades of tanker trucks. Improving infrastructure, then, could prove key to the boom that is buoying New Mexico’s finances as well as for economic development elsewhere.

Proponents of raising the gas tax note New Mexico already has a lower rate than all of its neighbors, according to data from American Petroleum Institute.

New Mexico’s excise tax totals 17 cents a gallon. Arizona charges 18 cents, Texas 20 cents, Colorado 22 cents and Utah 30 cents. Nationwide, the average state gasoline tax is about 23 cents a gallon.

The state’s tax does not go as far as it did in 1993, lagging behind inflation. As Gov. Susana Martinez repeatedly vetoed proposals to raise the gas tax during her eight years in office, manufacturers were marketing more fuel efficient vehicles that could give drivers more out of each gallon of fuel.

Drafts of the state budget call for steering hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s windfall of oil revenue into infrastructure but backers of raising the gas tax argue the government needs a steady stream of revenue to pay for maintaining its highways into the future.

Using money that may not be around in future years, when the oil market tanks, could only squeeze out other priorities in the future, the thinking goes.

“We need to have a recurring revenue stream of revenue,” said Rep. Jim Trujillo, a Democrat from Santa Fe who chairs the Taxation and Revenue Committee and is a co-sponsor of House Bill 6.

Trujillo cautioned that the bill is at an early stage, with everything up for discussion.

At this point, House Bill 6 aims to lower the overall gross receipts tax that New Mexicans pay on many goods and services.

Still, going over the math of the state budget that is beginning to take shape, he argues new revenue is going to have to come from someplace and reinstating the tax on food seems to be a nonstarter.

If the state gives teachers a raise, for example, that’s a recurring expense lawmakers will have to account for in coming years.

When lean times return, he argued, New Mexico could end up right back where it was a few years ago, sweeping money meant for infrastructure to patch holes in other parts of the budget.

Republicans counter that the potentially fleeting nature of the state’s current windfall is all the more reason to put much of that money into roads and projects that will not require the same level of spending year after year.

Rep. Jason Harper, R-Rio Rancho, said the gas tax may need to be raised to keep pace with rising costs. But he argued for a more modest increase — perhaps 5 cents per gallon — if one is necessary.

But the questioned whether that is even needed this year.

“In a year when we have huge surpluses, why are we even talking about raising taxes?” said Rep. Jason Harper, R-Rio Rancho.

Critics have also long argued that increasing the gas tax is regressive, falling disproportionately on low-income people and especially those in rural areas as well as those who cannot afford newer, fuel-efficient vehicles.

All of this has combined to make raising the gas tax a very politically sensitive issue.

After all, Democrat Bruce King was the last governor to sign a law raising the gas tax. And it handed plenty of fodder for attacks by Republican Gary Johnson during the 1994 campaign. Johnson, of course, ended up winning the election.

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